E-Mail IMAGE: Wanli Yang, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source, working on a resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) system. Yang adapted the RIXS technique for a recent Joule study... view more Credit: Berkeley Lab An international team working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used a unique X-ray instrument to learn new things about lithium-rich battery materials that have been the subject of much study for their potential to extend the range of electric vehicles and the operation of electronic devices. The researchers focused their investigations on a material called lithium manganese oxide (Li2MnO3), the extreme example of so-called "lithium-rich" materials, containing the largest amount of lithium possible within this family of materials. A recently developed tenet of the battery community is that battery electrodes composed of lithium-rich materials could offer high-voltage, high-capacity operation because the oxygen in the material participates in reversible chemical "redox" reactions, in which oxygen atoms cyclically lose and gain electrons, helping the battery have a higher capacity to store and use electrical charge.