ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
The nonexistence of a paddlewheel effect in superionic conductors.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Disentangling cation-polyanion coupling reveals which anion motion dominates cation transport in solid electrolytes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Disentangling Multiscale Cation-Anion Dynamics in LiSmall science · 2026Article
- Enhancing LiSmall (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Complex Dynamics in Argyrodite Solid-State Ion Conductors.Chemistry of materials : a publication of the American Chemical Society · 2026Review
- Triggering dynamically disordered lithium sublattice in superionic conductors.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Microscopic Mechanisms of Superionic Na-ion Conductivity in Crystalline and Amorphous NaMOClACS energy letters · 2026Article
- Non-Monotonic Ion Conductivity in Lithium-Aluminum-Chloride Glass Solid-State Electrolytes Explained by Cascading Hopping.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- High Ionic Conduction in Rb- and Cs-Mixed Cation Amide for Energy Storage.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2025Article
- A Dynamically Induced Phase Transition in NaJournal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Reply to Smith and Siegel: Most lithium hops in paddlewheel-claimed conductors occur without spatially and temporally correlated anion-group rotations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A proper definition of the paddlewheel effect affirms its existence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Since the 1980s, the paddlewheel effect has been suggested as a mechanism to boost lithium-ion diffusion in inorganic materials via the rotation of rotor-like anion groups. However, it remains unclear whether the paddlewheel effect, defined as large-angle anion group rotations assisting Li hopping, indeed exists; furthermore, the physical mechanism by which the anion-group dynamics affect lithium-ion diffusion has not yet been established. In this work, we differentiate various types of rotational motions of anion groups and develop quaternion-based algorithms to detect, quantify, and relate them to lithium-ion motion in ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. Our analysis demonstrates that, in fact, the paddlewheel effect, where an anion group makes a large angle rotation to assist a lithium-ion hop, does not exist and thus is not responsible for the fast lithium-ion diffusion in superionic conductors, as historically claimed. Instead, we find that materials with topologically isolated anion groups can enhance lithium-ion diffusivity via a more classic nondynamic soft-cradle mechanism, where the anion groups tilt to provide optimal coordination to a lithium ion throughout the hopping process to lower the migration barrier. This anion-group disorder is static in nature, rather than dynamic and can explain most of the experimental observations. Our work substantiates the nonexistence of the long-debated paddlewheel effect and clarifies any correlation that may exist between anion-group rotations and fast ionic diffusion in inorganic materials.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.