This work presents an ab initio exploration of fundamental mechanisms with direct relevance to dendrite formation at lithium-electrolyte interfaces. Specifically, we explore surface diffusion barriers and solvated surface energies of typical solid-el
ectrolyte interphase layers of lithium metal electrodes. Our results indicate that surface diffusion is an important mechanism for understanding the recently observed dendrite suppression from lithium-halide passivating layers, which were motivated by our previous work. Our results uncover possible mechanisms underlying a new pathway for mitigating dendridic electrodeposition of lithium on metal and thereby contribute to the ongoing efforts to develop stable lithium metal anodes for rechargeable battery systems.
Continuum solvation models enable efficient first principles calculations of chemical reactions in solution, but require extensive parametrization and fitting for each solvent and class of solute systems. Here, we examine the assumptions of continuum
solvation models in detail and replace empirical terms with physical models in order to construct a minimally-empirical solvation model. Specifically, we derive solvent radii from the nonlocal dielectric response of the solvent from ab initio calculations, construct a closed-form and parameter-free weighted-density approximation for the free energy of the cavity formation, and employ a pair-potential approximation for the dispersion energy. We show that the resulting model with a single solvent-independent parameter: the electron density threshold ($n_c$), and a single solvent-dependent parameter: the dispersion scale factor ($s_6$), reproduces solvation energies of organic molecules in water, chloroform and carbon tetrachloride with RMS errors of 1.1, 0.6 and 0.5 kcal/mol respectively. We additionally show that fitting the solvent-dependent $s_6$ parameter to the solvation energy of a single non-polar molecule does not substantially increase these errors. Parametrization of this model for other solvents, therefore, requires minimal effort and is possible without extensive databases of experimental solvation free energies.
Implicit electron-density solvation models based on joint density-functional theory offer a computationally efficient solution to the problem of calculating thermodynamic quantities of solvated systems from firstprinciples quantum mechanics. However,
despite much recent interest in such models, to date the applicability of such models in the plane-wave context to non-aqueous solvents has been limited because the determination of the model parameters requires fitting to a large database of experimental solvation energies for each new solvent considered. This work presents an alternate approach which allows development of new iso-density models for a large class of protic and aprotic solvents from only simple, single-molecule ab initio calculations and readily available bulk thermodynamic data.
