Ultrafast laser one-step construction of 3D micro-/nanostructures achieving high-performance zinc metal anodes

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries provide a most promising alternative to the existing lithium-ion batteries due to their high theoretical capacity, intrinsic safety, and low cost. However, commercializing aqueous zinc-ion batteries suffer from dendritic growth and side reactions on the surface of metallic zinc, resulting in poor reversibility. To overcome this critical challenge, here, we report a one-step ultrafast laser processing method for fabricating three-dimensional micro-/nanostructures on zinc anodes to optimize zinc nucleation and deposition processes. It is demonstrated that the three-dimensional micro-/nanostructure with increased specific surface area significantly reduces nucleation overpotential, as well as preferentially absorbs zinc ions to prevent dendritic protuberances and corrosion. As a result, the presence of three-dimensional micro-/nanostructures on the zinc metal delivers stable zinc plating/stripping beyond 2500 h (2 mA cm^-2/1 mAh cm^-2) in symmetric cells, a high Coulombic efficiency (99.71%) in half cells, and moreover an improved capacity retention (71.8%) is also observed in full cells. Equally intriguingly, the pouch cell with three-dimensional micro-/nanostructures can operate across various bending states without severely compromising performance. This work provides an effective strategy to construct ultrafine and high-precision three-dimensional micro-/nanostructures achieving high-performance zinc metal anodes and is expected to be of immediate benefit to other metal-based electrodes.