Symposium CH05-Embracing Brilliant Photon Sources for Energy Materials Research

Recently, storage ring-based synchrotron photon sources across the globe have started to carry out transformational upgrades or new builds, which will boost X-ray brightness and coherence by 2–3 orders of magnitude as compared to existing facilities. The highly brilliant photon source will make it practical and standard to carry out multimodal experiments for energy materials research spanning a vast range of energy, temporal and spatial scales. Such developments would be matched well by simultaneous advances in data analysis, theory, and computation which will deliver new integration and cooperation of simulations and experiments. Particularly, the structural, chemical, and electronic configurative information of various technologically important energy materials and devices will be experimentally acquired and rendered in grain-by-grain or domain-by-domain manner rather than statistical sum or average by taking the full advantage of the brilliant photon sources. New methods for extracting deep insights from massive volumes of data and new parameters that can then be incorporated into thermodynamic and mechanistic models of materials will be developed to probe sophisticated systems and complex processes previously impractical to investigate with precision.
To embrace the pressing scientific opportunities and address challenges, we envision this symposium to highlight most recent trends in the utilization of novel or improved X-ray characterization techniques, methodologies and detection modalities enabled by highly brilliant photon sources in fundamental and applied research on a wide range of energy materials and devices. This symposium would help energy materials researchers from various backgrounds to understand and take advantage of advanced characterization, high-throughput experiment and data-driven analysis approaches (e.g. AI/ML) to solve the pressing problems. Specific sessions will be organized in regard to the scientific topics to support a crosscutting approach between experiments, theory and AI/ML.

catalytic energy storage extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) in situ operando x-ray diffraction (XRD) x-ray fluorescence x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) x-ray reflectivity x-ray tomography