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Lithium ion batteries are quintessential components of modern life. They are used to power smart devices — phones, tablets, laptops, and are rapidly becoming major elements in the automotive industry. Demand projections for lithium are skyrocketing with production struggling to keep up pace. This drive is due mostly to the rapid adoption of electric vehicles; sales of electric vehicles in 2020 are more than double what they were only a year prior. With such staggering growth it is important to understand how lithium is sourced and what that means for the environment. Will production even be capable of meeting the demand as more industries make use of this valuable element? How will the environmental impact of lithium affect growth? This thesis attempts to answer these questions as the world looks to a decade of rapid growth for lithium ion batteries.
In highly hydrogenated IO:H, ne significantly decreased as temperature increased from 5 K to 140 K. To probe this unusual behavior, samples were illuminated, then ne, surface work function (WF), and spatially resolved microscopic current mapping were measured and tracked. Large increases in ne and corresponding decreases in WF were observed---these both exhibited slow reversions toward pre-illumination values over 6-12 days. A hydrogen-related defect was proposed as source of the photoexcitation, while a lattice defect diffusion mechanism causes the extended decay. Both arise from an under-coordination of the In.
An enhancement of μe was observed with increasing amorphous fraction in IO:H. An increase in population of corner- and edge-sharing polyhedra consisting of metal cations and oxygen anions is thought to be the origin. This indicates some measure of medium-range order in the amorphous structure, and gives rise to a general principle dictating μe in TCOs---even amorphous TCOs. Testing this principle resulted in observing an enhancement of μe up to 35 cm^2/Vs in amorphous ZTO (a-ZTO), one of the highest reported a-ZTO μe values (at ne > 10^19 cm^-3) to date. These results highlight the role of local distortions and cation coordination in determining the microscopic origins of carrier generation and transport. In addition, the strong likelihood of under-coordination of one cation species leading to high carrier concentrations is proposed. This diverges from the historical indictment of oxygen vacancies controlling carrier population in crystalline oxides, which by definition cannot occur in amorphous systems, and provides a framework to discuss key structural descriptors in these disordered phase materials.