Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Seen close-up, the flow of ions between battery electrodes is actually a series of erratic, atomic-scale hops. Experiments in a laser lab at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory showed that when shaken with a jolt of voltage, most ions briefly hopped backward to their previous positions before resuming their usual erratic journeys — the first indication that they remembered, in a sense, where they had just been. Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National.
But when seen on an atomic scale, that smooth flow is an illusion: Individual ions hop erratically from one open space to another within the electrolyte’s roomy atomic lattice, nudged in the direction of an electrode by a steady voltage. Those hops are hard to predict and a challenge to trigger and detect.
The ions’ “fuzzy memory,” as Poletayev puts it, lasts just a few billionths of a second. But knowing that it exists will help scientists predict, for the first time, what traveling ions will do next – an important consideration for discovering and developing new materials. By varying the time between the laser pulse and the measurement, they were able to precisely determine how the ions’ speed and preferred direction changed in the few trillionths of a second after the jolt from the laser.“There are multiple weird and unusual things going on in the ion hopping process,” said SLAC and Stanford Professor Aaron Lindenberg, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences who led the study.
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