electrode

Picture a long thread trapped inside a sphere with charged walls. The thread is the virus's RNA; the sphere is its protein shell. The thread tries to settle so that its charges sit as close as possible to opposite charges on the wall.

Turn off the stove, and water stops boiling almost instantly. In the world of catalysis, researchers expected a similar picture: stop the reaction, and all intermediate particles vanish right away. But fresh observations of platinum nanoparticles tell a different story.

Every battery or supercapacitor has an unassuming player — the polymer glue. It binds the active material particles together and helps them stick to the current collector. Previously, it was considered just inert mass: it's there, as long as it doesn't get in the way. But in this work, the glue takes center stage.

The river splits in two. One branch is wide and fast, with water flowing smoothly, but as temperature rises, the flow slows: eddies and waves appear. The second branch is narrow, with rapids, where water leaps from rock to rock. This flow, on the contrary, becomes more lively with warming.

Crystals glued to the outside and inside of a metal wall act as an invisible channel. One, receiving current, starts to tremble, and these vibrations, like ripples on water, spread out in all directions through the metal. The inner crystal catches this tremor and generates electricity again.

Two pendulums on a shared string trade motion: push one, and the second starts swinging, and a moment later the first gets a push back. In a thorium-229 atom, energy flows nearly loss-free between the electron shell and the nucleus.

A solid electrolyte is not just a crystal lattice: it’s a bustling metropolis for ions. Each act of conduction resembles a trip through the city: there are wide highways with low energy barriers, gridlocks in bottlenecks, and tricky detours where an ion can get stuck.

A superconductor is like an ideal highway with no traffic lights: electrons race along without hindrance. But apply a voltage, and the picture changes. In a new experiment, physicists found that an electric field penetrates the superconductor and creates a mixed regime inside.

A lithium battery is like a tiny city: lithium ions are the residents who move between electrode neighborhoods, generating current. But to understand how much energy the city can deliver, you need to know not only the street layout (the material's structure) but also how residents interact with neighbors, transportation, and even the weather.

In murky mud, between two electrodes, long chains of bacteria line up: each one as thin as a microscopic cable. Every such filament conducts current over a full centimeter, a true marathon for a microbe.

An ordinary diode in electronics works like a one-way street: current flows in only one direction. In superconductors, where electricity flows without resistance, such behavior has long been elusive — current is usually symmetric. The authors of the new work found a way to create a perfect superconducting diode using light.

A quantum battery is not a box of chemicals but a chain of tiny magnets (spins) capable of storing energy. Its main trick: charge many particles at once, using their quantum entanglement. But there's a catch — not all entanglement works.

An ordinary phone battery breathes — not with air, but with contact. Inside a solid body, where there are no liquids, lithium presses against the electrolyte (the ion-conducting substance) during charging and pulls away during discharging, like a lung on inhale and exhale. This 'breathing' is not poetry but physics: each cycle creates and destroys the contact points through which current flows.

A lithium-ion battery is like a multi-story building where lithium ions live on every floor. When you charge the battery, the ions move from floor to floor, and the whole building warms up a bit. Usually, this heat dissipates evenly, like from underfloor heating. But sometimes one spot gets too hot, and then the whole building can go up in flames.

A memristor is a resistor with a memory: after the current is turned off, it retains its resistance. Inside, a thin film of metal oxide is sandwiched between two metal electrodes. When a strong current is first passed through the device, conductive filaments of oxygen vacancies form in the oxide, and the resistance drops sharply.

A lithium battery is like a sandwich: two slices of bread are the electrodes, and the filling between them is the electrolyte, through which lithium ions shuffle back and forth. In conventional batteries, the filling is liquid, like a sauce, and it can leak or catch fire.

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity is an age-old dream of clean fuel. But tiny gas bubbles stand in the way: they cling to the electrodes like foam on the side of a soda glass, interfering with the current's work. Each bubble is a tiny plug, blocking part of the surface where the reaction should occur.

A metal filament as thin as a hair grows through the ceramic like a root through asphalt. In solid-state batteries, such filaments are called dendrites, and they appear when the charging current exceeds a critical threshold. The ceramic electrolyte is solid but brittle, like glass.

A metal is a sea of electrons that move almost freely, colliding only occasionally. But in some materials, this sea suddenly becomes viscous and unpredictable: electrons stop behaving like independent particles. Physicists call this state 'non-Fermi liquid,' and it remains a puzzle.

The quantum battery works like a sponge that absorbs light but won't release it without a forced squeeze. The inspiration came from bacteria's natural solar traps: capturing solar photons, they transfer energy almost losslessly, as proven by spectroscopy.

A membrane for water electrolysis is like a sponge soaked with water. Inside it, hydroxide ions, particles that carry electric charge, must move freely. But exactly how they move has long been a mystery: tracking each ion in an experiment is too difficult.

A lithium battery is like a house with a storage room: during charging, lithium goes inside; during discharging, it comes out. But if the storage room gets cluttered, some lithium stays inside forever. How much lithium returns depends on the metal the walls are made of. The authors of the study took four metals: aluminum, magnesium, silver, and copper.

A laser strikes a strontium atom, and two electrons fly out at once. Previously, it was thought that in such double ionization each electron acts on its own: one is knocked out first, the second later, randomly.

Two phones with identical batteries: one charges in a basement with a weak signal, and the process goes slower. The battery percentage here plays the role of a clock hand. Physicists applied the same logic to the quantum world. Their clock is a microscopic battery that stores energy. The charging rate depends on a hidden quantum 'mode'—like a switch.

A semiconductor film just one atom thick is like a communal apartment: it houses negatively charged electrons and positively charged 'holes.' When light hits such a film, an electron and a hole can pair up into an exciton — a bound state of an electron and a hole, akin to a hydrogen atom.

Batteries usually have two terminals — an anode and a cathode. Engineers are trying to remove the anode from solid-state batteries (with solid electrolytes) to make them lighter and more capacious. During charging, metal should deposit itself as a layer on the contact, and then vanish completely during discharge. But after a few cycles, capacity drops.

Modern batteries with liquid electrolytes can leak or catch fire. Polymer electrolytes (solid, plastic-like materials) solve that problem, but ions move through them more slowly, so the battery loses power. Researchers set up a virtual assembly line: a computer program generated new polymer structures the way a chef experiments with new dough recipes.

Sodium is lithium's neighbor on the periodic table, but it's hundreds of times more abundant in the Earth's crust and much cheaper. So sodium batteries could replace lithium ones in electric vehicles and energy storage.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without loss, but their properties are usually fixed. In the new work, scientists made a device resembling a crossroads of two superconducting tracks. By applying a weak magnetic field perpendicular to this crossroads, they were able to change the current the device can carry by a factor of four.

Chemistry has two worlds: in one, the catalyst is a solid particle and the reaction happens on its surface; in the other, it's a dissolved molecule where everything occurs around a single metal center. These worlds rarely meet. But in a new study, they collide. The researchers took iron oxide, a black powder used in magnetic tapes, and scattered single rhodium atoms across its surface.

Diamond is not just a gemstone. This crystal can conduct electricity when free charge carriers, electrons and holes, appear in it. But how fast do they move? In scientific papers, numbers vary by tens of times. One lab reports a mobility of 1000 cm²/(V·s), another 4000.

A piece of chromium exposed to air gets covered in invisible armor, an oxide film, within a minute. That film protects the metal from rust, but for a battery it's a disaster: the film blocks chromium ions, so no current flows. Scientists mixed five metals — chromium, bismuth, copper, tin, and nickel.

Two water droplets tremble in sync — because they're connected by a straw. So it is with entangled particles: their unity may be held together by a microscopic wormhole.