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    Stress‐Actuated Spiral Microelectrode for High‐Performance Lithium‐Ion Microbatteries
    (2020) Tang, Hongmei; Karnaushenko, Dmitriy D.; Neu, Volker; Gabler, Felix; Wang, Sitao; Liu, Lixiang; Li, Yang; Wang, Jiawei; Zhu, Minshen; Schmidt, Oliver G.
    Miniaturization of batteries lags behind the success of modern electronic devices. Neither the device volume nor the energy density of microbatteries meets the requirement of microscale electronic devices. The main limitation for pushing the energy density of microbatteries arises from the low mass loading of active materials. However, merely pushing the mass loading through increased electrode thickness is accompanied by the long charge transfer pathway and inferior mechanical properties for long‐term operation. Here, a new spiral microelectrode upon stress‐actuation accomplishes high mass loading but short charge transfer pathways. At a small footprint area of around 1 mm2, a 21‐fold increase of the mass loading is achieved while featuring fast charge transfer at the nanoscale. The spiral microelectrode delivers a maximum area capacity of 1053 µAh cm−2 with a retention of 67% over 50 cycles. Moreover, the energy density of the cylinder microbattery using the spiral microelectrode as the anode reaches 12.6 mWh cm−3 at an ultrasmall volume of 3 mm3. In terms of the device volume and energy density, the cylinder microbattery outperforms most of the current microbattery technologies, and hence provides a new strategy to develop high‐performance microbatteries that can be integrated with miniaturized electronic devices.
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    Perovskite Origami for Programmable Microtube Lasing
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2021) Dong, Haiyun; Saggau, Christian Niclaas; Zhu, Minshen; Liang, Jie; Duan, Shengkai; Wang, Xiaoyu; Tang, Hongmei; Yin, Yin; Wang, Xiaoxia; Wang, Jiawei; Zhang, Chunhuan; Zhao, Yong Sheng; Ma, Libo; Schmidt, Oliver G.
    Metal halide perovskites are promising materials for optoelectronic and photonic applications ranging from photovoltaics to laser devices. However, current perovskite devices are constrained to simple low-dimensional structures suffering from limited design freedom and holding up performance improvement and functionality upgrades. Here, a micro-origami technique is developed to program 3D perovskite microarchitectures toward a new type of microcavity laser. The design flexibility in 3D supports not only outstanding laser performance such as low threshold, tunable output, and high stability but also yields new functionalities like 3D confined mode lasing and directional emission in, for example, laser “array-in-array” systems. The results represent a significant step forward toward programmable microarchitectures that take perovskite optoelectronics and photonics into the 3D era. © 2021 The Authors. Advanced Functional Materials published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.
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    Antifreezing Hydrogel with High Zinc Reversibility for Flexible and Durable Aqueous Batteries by Cooperative Hydrated Cations
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2020) Zhu, Minshen; Wang, Xiaojie; Tang, Hongmei; Wang, Jiawei; Hao, Qi; Liu, Lixiang; Li, Yang; Zhang, Kai; Schmidt, Oliver G.
    Hydrogels are widely used in flexible aqueous batteries due to their liquid-like ion transportation abilities and solid-like mechanical properties. Their potential applications in flexible and wearable electronics introduce a fundamental challenge: how to lower the freezing point of hydrogels to preserve these merits without sacrificing hydrogels' basic advantages in low cost and high safety. Moreover, zinc as an ideal anode in aqueous batteries suffers from low reversibility because of the formation of insulative byproducts, which is mainly caused by hydrogen evolution via extensive hydration of zinc ions. This, in principle, requires the suppression of hydration, which induces an undesirable increase in the freezing point of hydrogels. Here, it is demonstrated that cooperatively hydrated cations, zinc and lithium ions in hydrogels, are very effective in addressing the above challenges. This simple but unique hydrogel not only enables a 98% capacity retention upon cooling down to −20 °C from room temperature but also allows a near 100% capacity retention with >99.5% Coulombic efficiency over 500 cycles at −20 °C. In addition, the strengthened mechanical properties of the hydrogel under subzero temperatures result in excellent durability under various harsh deformations after the freezing process. © 2019 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
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    Steering Directional Light Emission and Mode Chirality through Postshaping of Cavity Geometry
    (Hoboke, NJ : Wiley, 2020) Wang, Jiawei; Tang, Min; Yang, Yue-De; Yin, Yin; Chen, Yan; Saggau, Christian Niclaas; Zhu, Minshen; Yuan, Xiaobo; Karnaushenko, Dmitriy; Huang, Yong-Zhen; Ma, Libo; Schmidt, Oliver G.
    Dielectric optical microcavities have been explored as an excellent platform to manipulate the light flow and investigate non‐Hermitian physics in open optical systems. For whispering gallery mode optical microcavities, modifying the rotational symmetry is highly desirable for intriguing phenomena such as degenerated chiral modes and directional light emission. However, for the state‐of‐the‐art approaches, namely deforming the cavity geometry by precision lithography or introducing local scatterers near the cavity boundary via micromanipulation, there is a lack of flexibility in fine‐adjusting of chiral symmetry and far‐field emission direction. Here, precise engineering of cavity boundary using electron‐beam‐induced deposition is reported based on rolled‐up nanomembrane‐enabled spiral‐shaped microcavities. The deformation of outer boundary results in delicate tailoring of asymmetric backscattering between the outer and inner rolling edges, and hence deterministically strong mode chirality. Besides, the crescent‐shaped high‐index nanocap leads to modified light tunneling channels and inflected far‐field emission angle. It is envisioned that such a localized deposition‐assisted technique for adjusting the structural deformation of 3D optical microcavities will be highly useful for understanding rich insights in non‐Hermitian photonics and unfolding exotic properties on lasing, sensing, and cavity quantum electrodynamics.