Researchers at Rice University, United States, reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters that they had packed an entire lithium ion energy storage device into a single nanowire. According to the researchers, their creation is as small as such devices can possibly get. Their device could be valuable as a rechargeable power source for new generations of nanoelectronics. The Rice team, led by Professor Pulickel Ajayan, has been inching toward single-nanowire devices for years. Arava Leela Mohana Reddy, a research scientist at Rice and co-author of the paper, said, “The idea here is to fabricate nanowire energy storage devices with ultrathin separation between the electrodes. This affects the electrochemical behavior of the device. Our devices could be a very useful tool to probe nanoscale phenomenon.” The resulting devices show good capacity, and the researchers are working to fine-tune the materials in an effort to increase their ability to repeatedly charge and discharge. Sanketh Gowda, a chemical engineering graduate student and lead author of the paper, added, “There’s a lot to be done to optimize the devices in terms of performance. Optimization of the polymer separator and its thickness and an exploration of different electrode systems could lead to improvements.”
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