Credit: Panchapakesan Ganesh, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Dept. of Energy
Researchers predicted where lithium ions (green spheres) would pack and move in an open framework of epitaxially strained vanadium dioxide, depicted here by a stick model (oxygen-connecting bonds are red and vanadium-connecting bonds, turquoise). Guided by theory and computation, they designed, synthesized and tested the material—proving it indeed had excellent storage capacity, ion conduction and structural stability.