Presented by Aleksandr Rodin, Yale-NUS College
Solid-state batteries have the potential to play an integral part in applications where traditional liquid-electrolyte cells are not ideal. A vital component of these batteries is a solid electrolyte: an electronic insulator capable of carrying ions between the anode and the cathode. Finding an optimal material for this component is one of the main problems in this research field. Most of the theoretical research is performed using molecular dynamics simulations which, although very powerful, can obscure relevant physical mechanisms of ionic transport. On the other hand, simple toy models can fill a complementary role by making it possible to explore physics in analytically-tractable systems.