Operando Optical Microscopy of Energy Materials

In this talk, I will discuss recent work from our group in the areas of time-resolved optical absorption and scattering microscopies, especially applied to energy materials.

I will share results from Transient optical absorption microscopy (TAM), which allow access to the spatio-temporal dynamics of photogenerated species such as charge carriers, excitons and polaritons with sub-10nm spatial precision and sub-10fs time-resolution.

Ionic systems, as used in batteries or bioelectronic, are not traditionally considered to be amiable to interrogation with light. For such systems we establish Charge Photometry, as optical interferometric scattering microscopy approach, for high throughput operando characterisation of ion dynamics and phase transition in battery materials directly at the nanoscale, something that has never been possible before.

I will highlight how both these optical methods can be used within a multimodal suite, combining with methods such as SEM, EDX and synchrotron based x-ray studies to provide a powerful tool to correlate nanoscale dynamics and transport with structure and chemical makup.

References
Lim et al Nature, 2024, DOI:10.1038/s41586-024-07872-5.
Merryweather et al Nature, 2021, DOI: 10.1038/s41586- 021-03584-2.
Ashoka et al, Nature Materials, 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s41563- 023-01550-z.