Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have developed a silicon anode for lithium-ion batteries that outperforms current materials and gets around previous issues that would cause the battery to be inefficient and quickly degrade (or even fail catastrophically) with use. As the researchers focus on scaling up production, the advance could pave the way for higher-performance electric vehicles, electronics and all-around portable power.

Graphite has long been used to build the negative electrodes in lithium-ion batteries, but as batteries improve, it is slowly becoming a performance bottleneck because of the limited amount of energy that it can store.