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Dipoles disordered by design to increase capacity of energy-storage devices

Energy-storage devices called capacitors deliver power rapidly, but the amount of energy they can absorb is limited. Deliberately disordered electric dipoles in ‘antiferroelectric’ capacitor materials could solve this problem.
By
  1. Piush Behera

    1. Piush Behera is in the Research Lab of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

  2. Suraj S. Cheema

    1. Suraj S. Cheema is in the Research Lab of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA, and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With energy-storage technology, there is typically a trade-off between the amount of energy that can be stored and the speed with which that energy can be discharged to deliver power. Lithium-ion batteries, for example, can store a lot of energy, but their energy-delivery speeds — their power densities — are limited by the slow kinetics of the electrochemical processes that control discharge in these devices. Devices known as electrostatic capacitors, made from electrically insulating materials (dielectrics), can have much higher power densities, because their discharge mechanism is much faster. However, conventional dielectrics are limited by the amount of energy they can store, holding back the widespread adoption of these capacitors. In a paper in Nature, Yang et al.1 report a materials-engineering approach that overcomes this limitation.

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Nature 637, 1060-1062 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00085-4

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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