Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies of the Spatial Distribution of Charge Carriers

Charge carriers are an essential component of electrochemical devices or participants in redox processes and govern the achievable properties or performance of the considered materials. Since well-defined structural features of active components including the explicit coordination sphere of charge carriers typically exists at rather locale scale, the application of methods that require long-range order reflecting crystalline lattices such as X-ray diffraction is limited. In this context, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) constitutes a highly viable option as MRI (or more general NMR) is element selective, hence, charge carrier specific and able to tolerate ill-defined structural arrangements. A skillful combination of available MRI methods allows for monitoring of electrochemical processes with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution, and their recent applications in the field of batteries and other redox chemistry are concisely summarized and discussed in this review.