This work emphasizes the importance of understanding the phenomena of dendrite formation occurring in rechargeable metal batteries. These batteries can reach quite a high specific energy but have inherently short life due to dendritic growth. The current work implements different tomographic methods to visualize dendritic growth in real time and to quantify various dendrite characteristics at submicron and nanoscale levels. The methodology presented here can be also extended to study the growth of other metal dendrites in aqueous and nonaqueous batteries.

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The early stages of growth in chemical solution deposition of lead selenide thin films on GaAs(100) substrates were studied in detail. The deposition was found to depend strongly on substrate pre-treatment with sodium selenosulphate in an aqueous KOH solution. In cases where this stage of the process was neglected, film growth did not occur. The sequence of precursor addition and the pH of the solution were also found to be dominant factors affecting film growth. The film growth rate, grain size and the resulting roughness were all shown to increase with pH. Study of film growth kinetics revealed the selenide limited nature of the system. These factors were shown to be critical for reproducible deposition of high quality PbSe thin films.