Particles have "fuzzy memory" in solid-state batteries

When you shoot a laser at a solid-state battery, you find that the particles inside are not thrown into the chaos. This surprised a team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom.

The team discovered the persistence of memory in ions that help move electricity around solid-state batteries.
This discovery has improved the understanding of solid-state batteries, which are candidates for the next generation of safer and more powerful batteries.
A paper describing this study was published in the journal Nature.

The team is studying the behavior of ions in solid-state battery electrolytes when a laser emits a sudden voltage through it.
Previously, researchers observed that ions in these electrolytes "jump" from one place to another in a chaotic manner, ultimately causing charges to flow.

But the team found that within one billionth of a second, the ions briefly changed direction and returned to their previous position - then continued their chaotic way.
The main author Andrei Poletayev is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, who refers to it as "fuzzy memory.".

"Researchers have been using macroscopic tools to study ion transport for a long time, and they cannot observe what we see in this study," Poletayev said.
Researchers use high-frequency lasers with pulses of only a few trillions of seconds to observe the movement of ions - the light reflected from the electrolyte can tell them what the ions are doing.

"Many strange and unusual things happen during ion hopping," said senior author Aaron Lindenberg, a professor at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States, where experiments were conducted.
When we apply the force of vibrating the electrolyte, ions do not react immediately like most materials.
Ions may sit there for a while, suddenly jump up, and then sit there for a long time. You may need to wait for a while before suddenly experiencing a huge displacement.
Therefore, there are randomness factors in this process, which makes these experiments difficult.

Source: Laser Net