The scope of Diffusion Fundamentals (DF), both as open-access journal and conference series, has greatly broadened over the past two decades. In fact, most invited lectures of the present 10th jubilee conference deal with spreading phenomena in social sciences and humanities. In the present contribution, however, I shall rather go back to the roots of diffusion of particles in matter. Diffusion and transport of Li ions, in particular, has gained enormous interest in the last decades due their use in rechargeable batteries, which are nowadays ubiquitous. Details of the Li+ jumps, e.g., jump rates, activation energies, jump mechanisms and
their dimensionality, can be studied by various experimental methods. Among these, the bunch of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques is the most
versatile one. Whereas maximization of the ion conductivity of the electrolyte – preferably in the solid state for safety reasons – together with the search for an optimum electrode pair has been a continuous endeavor since the introduction of the Li ion battery in the 1990s, in recent years, the improvement of the electrolyte/electrode interfaces has received increased attention as being decisive for the optimization of battery performance.
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