No Arabic abstract
The electrification revolution in automobile industry and others demands annual production capacity of batteries at least on the order of 102 gigawatts hours, which presents a twofold challenge to supply of key materials such as cobalt and nickel and to recycling when the batteries retire. Pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical recycling are currently used in industry but suffer from complexity, high costs, and secondary pollution. Here we report a direct-recycling method in molten salts (MSDR) that is environmentally benign and value-creating based on a techno-economic analysis using real-world data and price information. We also experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of MSDR by upcycling a low-nickel polycrystalline LiNi0.5Mn0.3Co0.2O2 (NMC) cathode material that is widely used in early-year electric vehicles into Ni-rich (Ni > 65%) single-crystal NMCs with increased energy-density (>10% increase) and outstanding electrochemical performance (>94% capacity retention after 500 cycles in pouch-type full cells). This work opens up new opportunities for closed-loop recycling of electric vehicle batteries and manufacturing of next-generation NMC cathode materials.
We have demonstrated experimentally that the main breakdown-triggering mechanism in most gaseous detectors, including micropattern gaseous detectors, is sporadic electron jets from the cathode surfaces. Depending on conditions, each jet contains randomly from a few primary electrons up to 10^5, emitted in a time interval ranging between 0.1 microsecond to milliseconds. After the emission, these primary electrons experience a full gas multiplication in the detector and create spurious pulses. The rate of these jets increases with applied voltage and very sharply at voltages close to the breakdown limit. We found that these jets are in our measurements responsible for the breakdown-triggering at any counting rate between 10^(-2) Hz/mm^2 and 10^8 Hz/mm^2. We demonstrated on a few detectors that an optimized cathode-geometry, a high electrode surface quality and a proper choice of the gas mixture, considerably improve the performance characteristics and provide the highest possible gains.
This article presents the use of flexible metal foam substrates for the growth of III-nitride nanowire light emitters to tackle the inherent limitations of thin-film light emitting diodes as well as fabrication and application issues of traditional substrates. A dense packing of gallium nitride nanowires were grown on a nickel foam substrate. The nanowires grew predominantly along the a-plane direction, normal to the local surface of the nickel foam. Strong luminescence was observed from undoped GaN and InGaN quantum well light emitting diode nanowires.
Highly charged ions (HCIs) are promising candidates for the next generation of atomic clocks, owing to their tightly bound electron cloud, which significantly suppresses the common environmental disturbances to the quantum oscillator. Here we propose and pursue an experimental strategy that, while focusing on various HCIs of a single atomic element, keeps the number of candidate clock transitions as large as possible. Following this strategy, we identify four adjacent charge states of nickel HCIs that offer as many as six optical transitions. Experimentally, we demonstrated the essential capability of producing these ions in the low-energy compact Shanghai-Wuhan Electron Beam Ion Trap. We measured the wavelengths of four magnetic-dipole ($M$1) and one electric-quadrupole ($E$2) clock transitions with an accuracy of several ppm with a novel calibration method; two of these lines were observed and characterized for the first time in controlled laboratory settings. Compared to the earlier determinations, our measurements improved wavelength accuracy by an order of magnitude. Such measurements are crucial for constraining the range of laser wavelengths for finding the needle in a haystack narrow lines. In addition, we calculated frequencies and quality factors, evaluated sensitivity of these six transitions to the hypothetical variation of the electromagnetic fine structure constant $alpha$ needed for fundamental physics applications. We argue that all the six transitions in nickel HCIs offer intrinsic immunity to all common perturbations of quantum oscillators, and one of them has the projected fractional frequency uncertainty down to the remarkable level of 10$^{-19}$.
We discuss how x-ray Compton scattering spectra can be used for investigating the evolution of electronic states in cathode materials of Li batteries under the lithiation/delithiation process. In particular, our analysis of the Compton spectra taken from polycrystalline LixCoO2 samples shows that the spectra are dominated by the contribution of the O-2p redox orbital. We identify a distinct signature of d-orbital delocalization, which is tied directly to the conductivity of the material, providing a descriptor based on Compton spectra for monitoring the lithiation range with improved conductivity and kinetics for electrochemical operation. Our study demonstrates that Compton scattering spectroscopy can provide a window for probing complex electronic mechanisms underlying the charging and discharging processes in Li-battery materials.
We report plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (ALD) to prepare conformal nickel thin films and nanotubes by using nickelocene as a precursor, water as the oxidant agent and an in-cycle plasma enhanced reduction step with hydrogen. The optimized ALD pulse sequence, combined with a post-processing annealing treatment, allowed us to prepare 30 nm thick metallic Ni layers with a resistivity of 8 $muOmega$cm at room temperature and good conformality both on the planar substrates and nanotemplates. Thereby we fabricated several micrometer-long nickel nanotubes with diameters ranging from 120 to 330 nm. We report on the correlation between ALD growth and functional properties of individual Ni nanotubes characterized in terms of magneto-transport and the confinement of spin wave modes. The findings offer novel perspectives for Ni-based spintronics and magnonic devices operated in the GHz frequency regime with a 3D device architecture.