Seeding lithium seeds towards uniform lithium deposition for stable lithium metal anodes

Highlights: • A dense and uniform Li seed layer guides a dendrite-free Li deposition for Li metal anode. • Such layer decreases the Li nucleation overpotential for stable deposition in long cycling. • The seed can be easily planted on different substrates by a high current density deposition. -- Abstract: Lithium (Li) metal has been regarded as one of the most attractive anodes for high-energy-density batteries. However, the practical use of Li metal anode is hindered by the safety issues of Li dendrite growth caused by the non-uniform Li deposition. The initial Li nucleation behavior plays an important role in the Li deposition process, which guides the following Li growth structure. Herein, we show a simple method to plant the ultrafine Li seeds with uniform and dense distribution on the electrode surface by a fast deposition with very high current density, which effectively suppresses the dendrite growth by the seed directed deposition. The dense and uniform Li seed layer provides the highly lithiophilic active sites to greatly decrease the Li nucleation barrier and thus guide the uniform Li deposition. The Li anode with such layer achieves a dendrite-free surface and enhanced cycle stability for 350 h together with low voltage polarization of 20 mV under a capacity of 1 mAh cm⁻² and a current density of 3 mA cm⁻². Full cells with NCA as the cathode also deliver a stable cycling performance, indicating its great potential as a stable Li metal anode.