They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently.
This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator.
I believe in battery research a half cell is a perfectly acceptable test bed for quantifying cathode performance, given that the anode material is not the bottleneck in the device. Researchers shouldn't have to spend their time doing full-device optimization every time they want to demonstrate improvement in a material.
They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently.
This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04476-2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cell