English

Novel fast Li-ion conductors for solid-state electrolytes from first-principles

Materials Science 2026-01-07 v1

Abstract

We present a high-throughput computational screening for fast lithium-ion conductors to identify promising materials for application in all solid-state electrolytes. Starting from more than 30,000 Li-containing experimental structures sourced from Crystallography Open Database, Inorganic Crystal Structure Database and Materials Platform for Data Science, we perform highly automated calculations to identify electronic insulators. On these ~1000 structures, we use molecular dynamics simulations to estimate Li-ion diffusivities using the pinball model, which describes the potential energy landscape of diffusing lithium with accuracy similar to density functional theory while being 200-500 times faster. Then we study the ~60 most promising and previously unknown fast conductors with full first-principles molecular dynamics simulations at several temperatures to estimate their activation barriers. The results are discussed in detail for the 9 fastest conductors, including Li7NbO6Li_7NbO_6 which shows a remarkable ionic conductivity of ~5 mS/cm at room temperature. We further present the entire screening protocol, including the workflows where the accuracy of the pinball model is improved self-consistently, necessary to automatically running the required calculations and analysing their results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.03151,
  title  = {Novel fast Li-ion conductors for solid-state electrolytes from first-principles},
  author = {Tushar Singh Thakur and Loris Ercole and Nicola Marzari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.03151},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 15 figures, supplementary information

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:52:51.990Z