06.10.2022 2nd ELSICS Workshop and International Bunsen-Discussion Meeting

Energy Landscapes and Structure in Ion Conducting Solids

From September 26 to 28, (2022), the 2nd Workshop on Energy Landscape and Structure in Ion Conducting Solids (ELSICS) was held in the Alte Mensa in Göttingen. This workshop is the annual meeting of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) research unit FOR_5065: ELSICS. It was also assigned as an International Bunsen-Discussion Meeting by the DBG (Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft).

Approximately 60 participants from 10 countries – most of them in presence – discussed the status and the progress in the field of ELSICS in a total of 27 talks and one intense poster session. The conference sessions focused on the topics of long versus short range transport, energy landscapes, atomistic structure, single grain boundaries, transport coefficients (conductivities and diffusion coefficients), and relaxation times. Some sessions focused on experimental advances e.g. in atom probe tomography and solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, some other on advances in theory or on technical application. One high light were joint experimental-theoretical contributions from two or even three groups within the FOR_5065.

Below, a very short selection of specific topics discussed is presented:

One of the challenges in the field of energy landscapes of amorphous solids pertains to the transformation of site energy distribution (SED) to the respective populations (PSED). Here significant progress has been reported in a joint experimental-theoretical effort demonstrating the concentration dependence of diffusion coefficients in a lithium ion conducting glass. Challenges remain with respect to quantifying the transition from local ion hopping as seen in e.g. NMR and impedance spectroscopy (IS) to long range transport as seen e.g. in charge attachment induce transport (CAIT). But the qualitative picture has been laid out.

Another challenge regards the description of grain boundaries, in particular single grain boundaries, spanning the range from atomically resolved structure to macroscopic properties. Here, important progress involves the quantification of inter-diffusion at single g.b.s on sub-nm scale and macroscopic electrical properties of e.g. space charge zones.

More details regarding the conference, the invited speakers and the program are freely available under:
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb15/for5065/meetings/second-elscis-meeting
More details can be requested from the conference organizers under elsics@uni-marburg.de 

Spokesperson of the research unit is Prof. Karl-Michael Weitzel. The conference has been made possible by significant support from the German Science Foundation (DFG) but also the CRC 1073 (Atomic Scale Control of Energy Conversion), the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft (DBG) and the Fonds of the chemical Industry (FCI).

ELSICS workshops on the progress of the research in the field are held once per year.