Summary
“Batteries and energy storage” here covers the materials layer of electrochemical storage: the cathodes, anodes and electrolytes whose ion transport, phase behaviour and interfacial stability set what a cell can do. The supplied evidence is almost entirely 2026 preprint-stage research on next-generation chemistries rather than on cells or packs. Three threads dominate. First, all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs), where a solid electrolyte replaces the flammable liquid: a sulfide iodide argyrodite, Li6.6Si0.6Sb0.4S5I, was synthesised by ball milling and heat treatment and reached 9.9 mS cm^-1 at room temperature, then paired with a LiNbO3-coated LiNi0.7Co0.1Mn0.2O2 cathode in a full solid-state cell. Second, sodium-ion, pursued as a lithium-free alternative: hard carbon anodes engineered by carbon-layer reorientation and closed-pore formation to break the trade-off between initial Coulombic efficiency and reversible capacity, layered oxide cathodes whose Na-vacancy ordering couples to symmetry-changing structural transitions, and speculative two-dimensional anodes with Na migration barriers as low as 0.19 eV.
The third and arguably more consequential thread is the computational toolchain. Machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) now substitute for ab initio molecular dynamics at a fraction of the cost, extending accessible timescales from picoseconds to nanoseconds and allowing whole alloy series to be swept. Examples: MACE and NequIP potentials trained on melt-quench data to probe structure and ion transport in molten Li2CO3, with MACE showing better transferability; the universal PET-MAD potential applied to the Li3YCl6xBr6(1-x) halide electrolyte alloy to separate lattice-parameter effects from chemical ordering; and machine-learned polaron dynamics extended to reduced oxide surfaces, finding small-polaron mobility suppressed by several orders of magnitude at the rutile TiO2(110) surface relative to bulk. Alongside this sit composition-only property predictors benchmarked against each other, with CrabNet beating MODNet and a Magpie random forest on the Materials Project Battery Explorer dataset, phonon-spectrum descriptors of ionic conductivity, and literature mining that recovered 13,740 X-ray absorption spectra across 66 absorbing elements from battery papers.
One outlier deserves flagging because it shares the vocabulary but not the field: “quantum batteries” are nanoscale devices exploiting collective quantum effects for a charging advantage, proposed here as a dual-use mode of superconducting circuits that can switch between energy storage and quantum sensing. This is quantum information research, not grid or vehicle storage, and should not be read as evidence about batteries in the commercial sense.
Evidence base
- 15 June 2026: machine-learned polaron dynamics extended to oxygen-deficient rutile TiO2(110) reached several nanoseconds, versus the picosecond limit of ab initio molecular dynamics, and found small-polaron mobility suppressed by several orders of magnitude at the surface relative to bulk
- 16 June 2026: a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm using a chain-mapped Caldeira-Leggett embedding placed the LiFePO4 differential-capacity peak within the ±5 mV reproducibility of the experimental plateau using a single voltage anchor on a DFT-fixed Hamiltonian
- 20 July 2026: phase-field simulation of Na all-solid-state batteries with polycrystalline Na3SbS4 showed stripping is intrinsically asymmetric to plating, leaving isolated Na kinetically stabilised at grain-boundary junctions that is reactivated on subsequent plating and amplifies dendrite penetration
- 22 July 2026: a procedural review of 303 recent open-access battery-materials papers found 49% used diffusivity values to support structure-property transport claims, and only 15% of those clearly stated that length scale was measured after grinding or that grinding was not used
- 23 July 2026: Li6.6Si0.6Sb0.4S5I argyrodite synthesised by ball milling and heat treatment achieved 9.9 mS cm^-1 room-temperature ionic conductivity and was integrated with a LiNbO3-coated LiNi0.7Co0.1Mn0.2O2 cathode into an all-solid-state cell
- 28 July 2026: multimodal mining of the battery literature produced an open dataset of 13,740 X-ray absorption spectra spanning 66 absorbing elements, with expert validation of extracted spectra and metadata
Open questions
- How many cycles does the Li6.6Si0.6Sb0.4S5I cell with the LiNbO3-coated LiNi0.7Co0.1Mn0.2O2 cathode survive, and at what capacity retention and temperature range?
- Does the isolated-metal reactivation mechanism identified by phase-field simulation in Na3SbS4 also govern lithium sulfide and halide electrolytes, and can electrolyte microstructure engineering suppress it?
- If the grind-measure protocol advocated in were applied retrospectively, how many of the published diffusivity rankings that guide screening datasets would reverse?
- Do composition-only predictors such as CrabNet and phonon descriptors such as Li-PDOS identify any material that is subsequently synthesised and confirmed experimentally, rather than only reranking known entries?
Assessment drafted 2026-08-31 from up to 18 KB sources using the technology-scorecard framework; scores are a draft read pending review.