Expert Interview: Ethan Crumlin

[00:00:07] Jenny: This is Jenny from Berkeley Lab Strategic Communications team. Today I’m here with Ethan Crumlin, a staff scientist at the Advanced Light Source and Chemical Sciences Division, and we’re going to spend some time talking about energy materials research happening at the Advanced Light Source. Welcome, Ethan.

[00:00:25] Ethan Crumlin: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here. 

[00:00:29] Jenny: Ethan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at the lab? 

[00:00:33] Ethan Crumlin: Sure. I am originally from the East Coast, so I’m a transplant to California, and now it has become my home thanks to Berkeley National Lab. And so here I’m a staff scientist at the Advanced Light Source and Chemical Science Division, where I’m a scientist, and program lead. And within the chemical science division, I’m the division deputy as well.

[00:00:57] Jenny: So first off. Can you give me a high-level overview of your energy materials work? 

[00:01:03] Ethan Crumlin: So, a lot of the science that we do is to look at energy materials, for example, while they’re actually operating. And so we want to understand what’s going on with those materials, in particular, the interfaces. So where that material is in direct contact with something else. Whether it’s a vapor, a gas, a liquid, or another solid. We want to see how that evolves as a function of time, operation, and exposure. And so we use these advanced techniques at the Advanced Light Source to be able to look at these interfaces under these operating conditions. 

[00:01:40] Jenny: So, the ALS has over 30 years of expertise in battery research. How has the ALS shaped the field? 

[00:01:49] Ethan Crumlin: With regards to battery research and how the ALS has shaped the field, one is it’s really helped to promote and propagate the ability to do fundamental research on battery electrode materials. Going from, think about 30 years ago, just bulk materials and maybe even at that time, battery materials weren’t really even being investigated, to be honest, at the amount that it is today. But generally, you’d be starting off with bulk materials and getting just bulk information from material, and it would be at best looked at before it would run and after it would run. That’s kind of this ex-situ, in-situ methodology.

When you look at it today, what we’ve really been pioneering is the ability to do these experiments in the operating condition and when it’s running. So being able to look at a battery chemistry when the battery is actually operating, you can apply a potential, you have a solid with a liquid, and it’s operating.

These are, I would say, a lot of the innovations that we’ve been able to provide going forward. Another unique aspect that ALS has is its primary focus, especially within the energy field. Many of the synchrotrons can cover a wide range of energies. ALS can cover a wide range from soft, all the way, you know, to ultra-high vacuum, all the way to tender and hard X-ray.

But there is this unique zone that we serve, which is a soft X-ray technique, and that’s a particular X-ray energy window that we are operating within. And this is something I would say we have been particularly pioneering a lot of the energy science capabilities for within this x-ray energy landscape.

And so this requires specific people with expertise and knowledge to be able to look at these materials using these specialized X-rays under these in-situ operando conditions. So this combination of people with a facility that is unique has yielded really innovative practices and concepts to be able to look at these materials in ways that have never been accessible before.

[00:03:54] Jenny: So let’s talk a little bit about the impact of the work. 

[00:03:58] Ethan Crumlin: So, I think there’s a couple of ways to answer that question of impact, right? And so one is, particularly in the context of the Advanced Light Source, which is a user facility, it’s that we want to not just make techniques available to answer scientific questions, but we want to do it so that a broad user base, so other scientists from around the world can have their questions that they have, and we can provide the expertise and the capabilities to work with them to answer those questions.

So that is part of the impact that we have. Another part of the impact is to do the actual science, right? And so we’re driving the technical innovations, we’re driving the scientific innovations to be able to progress the field forward. If we think about the arc that has happened between 30 years ago to today, for example, a lot of the techniques and capabilities were ex-situ.

So, you look at something before, look at, after you would look at just bulk or simple systems, you can only maybe get a few spectra a day of information. Fast forward to today where now we can look at many spectra, but we can do it also on systems that are running, and operating, and see how they’re evolving with time, with conditions.

And so this is this kind of in-situ operando style of measurements, and that is where we’re getting many more spectra, many more samples, and so we’re able to look at more systems with more depth, with more complicated questions being answered. For a broader scientific portfolio of users that are coming to do science with us.

[00:05:33] Jenny: Can you talk to me about what other techniques and capabilities the ALS has that can be used for battery research? 

[00:05:41] Ethan Crumlin: Great question. Almost all of the techniques can be used for looking at batteries and have been. They range from the infrared techniques…so let’s just talk about spectroscopy.

Spectroscopies – so this is getting some chemical information out, typically of a system. This will include your infrared spectroscopy. This will get vibrational information of how atoms are working with each other to resonant elastic x-ray scattering, another mouthful of a word. But this is getting at the chemical information as well as the electronic structure, so how the material is behaving.

Also, all of these are under the operando conditions, but these are getting you the spectral information. Again, it’s another type of chemical information that you can get from these materials to another category, which we haven’t talked too much about yet, but that would be considered your structural information.

So this would be like if you got an x-ray of your teeth, that’s a structural x-ray image. So you can imagine an image of how a battery is working. This would be in tomography as well as in scanning transmission x-ray microscopy. So it’s an ability of kind of stitching images together so you can look at particles of a battery material while they’re running and operating in real-time, as well as the diffraction of a material and how the crystal structure, how they expand and contract as a function of time. So these are ranges of spectral information. So this is your chemistry to the structural information. All of this can be looked at at ALS and has been used to look at battery materials throughout its years. 

[00:07:18] Jenny: So it sounds like the ALS has a wide array of techniques and capabilities, but I kind of want to hear from you about why Berkeley Lab and the ALS is the best place to be doing this research.

[00:07:30] Ethan Crumlin: That’s a great question. What makes Berkeley unique? So I would say a lot of it actually comes down to the people at this point. So we have a unique culture of innovation, of scientific leadership where we are not looking to just copy or reproduce or do what others have been doing. We are typically really looking to lead the field.

And how we try to do these investigations. So that’s part of our ethos, our culture. So you combine this resource of capabilities with our people. This creates something quite special. Now when you combine our people who are unique with the special capabilities that ALS does provide, like we do provide very stable x-rays, we do provide an innovative ecosystem of technological innovation of being able to do advanced science, this is where the hardware meets the people power, essentially of the science that we’re doing that union. Of hardware and people and in towards innovation. This, I think is actually quite special about what we’re doing that has put us in a position of leadership within the community to be very innovative and risk takers, I would say, at pushing the boundaries for doing these types of investigations.

[00:08:48] Jenny: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Ethan.

[00:08:51] Ethan Crumlin: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

[00:08:53] Jenny: If you’re interested in learning more about the research happening out of ALS, please check out als.lbl.gov or check out our main website at lbl.gov.