It turns out you can be too thin—especially if you’re a nanoscale battery. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); the University of Maryland, College Park; and Sandia National Laboratories built a series of nanowire batteries to demonstrate that the thickness of the electrolyte layer can dramatically affect the performance of the battery, effectively setting a lower limit to the size of the tiny power sources. The research was reported in a recent article in Nano Letters ("Electrolyte stability determines scaling limits for solid-state 3D Li-ion batteries," Nano Letters 12, 505-511, 2011).

The results are important because battery size and performance are key to developing autonomous microelectromechanical machines (MEMS), which have potentially revolutionary applications in a wide range of fields.

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