The past decades have witnessed the development of many technologies based on nanoionics, especially lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Now there is an urgent need for developing LIBs with good high-rate capability and high power. LIBs with nanostructured electrodes show great potentials for achieving such goals. However, the nature of Li-ion transport behaviors within the nanostructured electrodes is not well clarified yet. Here, Li-ion transport behaviors in LixCoO2 nanograins are investigated by employing conductive atomic force microscopy (C-AFM) technique to study the local Li-ion diffusion induced conductance change behaviors with a spatial resolution of ~10 nm. It is found that grain boundary has a low Li-ion diffusion energy barrier and provides a fast Li-ion diffusion pathway, which is also confirmed by our first principles calculation. This information provides important guidelines for designing high performance LIBs from a point view of optimizing the electrode material microstructures and the development of nanoionics.

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The xBa0.8Ca0.2TiO3-(1 − x)NiCuZn ferrite (x = 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9) nanocomposites were prepared by using sol-gel method. The densification of these composites was carried out using microwave sintering method. The magnetic field induced changes in the ferroelectric polarization loop may support the possible magnetoelectric coupling between Ba0.8Ca0.2TiO3 and NiCuZn ferrite phases. The observed change in ferroelectric polarization with applied magnetic field proves the coupling between magnetic and ferroelectric order parameters. The loop change is observed with the composition and with magnetic field. The magnetoelectric coefficient of the nanocomposite with x = 0.3 shows a value of 280 mV/cm Oe is obtained.

In this paper, we investigated the influence of strain on anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) in La0.67Ca0.33MnO3 (LCMO) films epitaxially grown on BaTiO3(001). For 250-nm-thick LCMO film, the AMR shows a peak near the metal-insulator transition (MIT) temperature, which is similar to that in bulk LCMO. When the thickness of LCMO is decreased to 150 nm, the AMR value achieves a maximum at low temperature. For 80-nm-thick LCMO film, in addition to the appearance of the maximum AMR at low temperature, the symmetry and sign of AMR are also changed, associated with interface strain in the different phases of BaTiO3. In comparison, the AMR for the reference LCMO films grown on SrTiO3(001) shows a maximum value near the MIT temperature regardless of the thickness of film. Our experiment results suggest that not only the strain value but also the distortion type can considerably tune the AMR of LCMO films.