James Le Houx

ACS Spring 2026 abstract deadline: September 29th!

We're chairing a new session in Atlanta. If you use large-scale facilities to study energy storage materials with photons, neutrons, muons, or lasers, we want to hear from you.

Submit here: tinyurl.com/4e3envar

#chemsky #research #ACSSpring2026

EIS ice baby

New ideas can be found in the intersection between battery science and planetary science.

Myself and @thebeamline.bsky.social are exploring how ice microstructure will impact radar measurements on Europa using tomography and EIS.

#Europa #icymoons #planetaryscience #tomography

🧪

In-situ dark field X-ray microscopy of solid state batteries this week. Seriously challenging experiment, thank you to the whole team at ID03 @esrf.fr

This was a huge team effort, so massive thanks to my co-authors and the teams at @psich.bsky.social, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, The Faraday Institution, and Diamond Light Source. Go read the paper!

By reinforcing that one part so well, we just forced the system to break somewhere else. The failure moved to the counter electrode, which cracked on the next cycle.

It's a powerful lesson: you can't just improve one piece of a battery. You have to think about the whole system. #HolisticDesign

Cell B (with the silver layer) was a different story. The Ag layer made the lithium plate beautifully. The interface was perfect, even at high currents. A total success!

...or so we thought.

4/6

As expected, Cell A (bare copper) failed fast. Lithium plated unevenly, creating stress that cracked the solid electrolyte.

3/6

We built two solid-state cells.

Cell A: Standard copper current collector

Cell B: Copper collector with a tiny 50nm silver layer

Then we watched them work (and fail) in 3D using synchrotron X-rays at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social 2/6

Operando X-ray Computed Tomography Reveals the Role of Interfacial Nucleation Nanolayers in Suppressing Mechanical Failure in Zero-Excess Lithium All-Solid-State Batteries Lithium metal (LM) and zero-excess lithium (ZE) anodes offer pathways to increase the energy density of all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs). We employ operando X-ray computed tomography (XCT) combined w...

The classic problem with the weakest link is that when you fix it, you just create a new one.

We saw this happen in real-time with solid-state batteries. Our new preprint shows how fixing one interface just moves the failure to the next weakest spot. 1/6

Paper link: doi.org/10.26434/che...

It's the same fundamental challenge: a growing tip penetrating a harder material. The method to map how roots navigate soil can now help us understand how dendrites cause catastrophic failure in batteries. 4/4

#TranslationalResearch #SoilScience #Biomimicry #SolidStateBatteries #EnergyStorage

But as a battery scientist, this is where it gets really exciting. While the article focuses on agriculture, the technique is a perfect demonstration of translational research. We can use it to understand a huge challenge: stopping dendrites in solid-state batteries. 3/4

To see this underground engineering, we took our experiment to the @diamondlightsource.bsky.social synchrotron. The article covers our work using dual X-ray techniques on the #DIAD beamline to visualise the forces at play. 2/4

Nature’s underground engineers: how plant roots could save harvests from drought Plant roots don’t just take from soil; they shape it.

What do solid-state batteries & plant roots have in common?

Excited to share our new article in @theconversation.com written with my collaborator Siul Ruiz. We dive into the powerful mechanics roots use to navigate tough soils, vital for our food security. 1/4
theconversation.com/natures-unde...

Pocket coffee for those 4am beamtimes

Means we can study architectured graphite, NMC, Na-ion Al-ion, and solid-state all in one experiment. Huge thank you to Dominic Spencer-Jolly, Emily Lu, Christoph Rau, and Shashi Marathe for making this possible.

Pretty exciting beamtime at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social I13-2 this week. We're going from manual sample centering to a fully automated process with a Yasakawa arm, hitting 150 battery samples a day and swapping optics from nm to µm resolution.

A huge thank you to both for funding this research, and to Diamond Light Source and the peer review panel for allowing us the beamtime to make this happen

The method is v generic, so could be applied to hemp, how seaweeds anchor to the seabed, how worms burrow etc. etc. Anything that's pushing through soil structures

Exactly! We're really interested in understanding precisely how they can do it. If we can learn that, we can breed crops with the same genetic advantage to act as 'pilot' crops for regenerative farming/rewilding. Plants that can break up tough/compacted soils and form biopore networks.

Coupled X-ray imaging/diffraction reveals soil mechanics during analogous root growth - npj Biological Physics and Mechanics npj Biological Physics and Mechanics - Coupled X-ray imaging/diffraction reveals soil mechanics during analogous root growth

How do plant roots push through hard soil? Our new paper in npj Biological Physics and Mechanics uses X-rays to watch it happen. This new view can help us breed more resilient crops for a changing climate.🌾 #SoilScience #Agriculture

tinyurl.com/5mdkrk3e @pereralj.bsky.social @tiinaroose.bsky.social

Coupled X-ray imaging/diffraction reveals soil mechanics during analogous root growth - npj Biological Physics and Mechanics npj Biological Physics and Mechanics - Coupled X-ray imaging/diffraction reveals soil mechanics during analogous root growth

Paper now available for full explanation ;) www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Well that's incredibly satisfying, new refactored code building and running a CI/CD pipeline in Github Actions. Only took 165 trys.....

Signs of life again....Watch this space

Harwell, home of the endangered bee orchid. Always impressed by the work of the conservationist team on site led by Bill Temple, looking forward to seeing them flower

FUSE Summer Placement in Didcot, Oxfordshire, England To apply for this placement, we are looking for the following: Essential:

Want a summer internship at Rutherford Appleton Lab? 🇬🇧 UK undergrads: learn battery characterisation, work with large science facilities & get hands-on exp with Gabriel Pérez & me!

🚨 Deadline April 14th (1 week left!) Apply: tinyurl.com/3trmeahp

#STEMcareers #Internship #RAL #UKStudents

One of those days today

Three-dimensional, multimodal synchrotron data for machine learning applications - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Three-dimensional, multimodal synchrotron data for machine learning applications

NEW PAPER ALERT! Ahem sorry for shouting.

5 XCT, 2 XRD-CT datasets, all from the same 13X Zeolite pellet.

Designed to train: super resolution models (SR-GANs), DNNs for reconstruction, CNNs for image segmentation and data fusion of heterogeneous datasets.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#AI #ML

Structured Li-ion NMC electrodes this week. Mapping the charge state throughout the charging cycle #chemsky

@helenczerski.bsky.social Very immersive writing Helen