Category: Physics

Summary: Estimating when SEI heterogeneity drives the dominant reactive mode away from a diffuse porous-anode pattern into a balanced interface-SEI-separator hotspot.

Lithium plating and solid-electrolyte interphase growth are known to depend on local heterogeneity, but it is still difficult to pinpoint when that heterogeneity qualitatively changes where instability concentrates. This experiment asks for the threshold where the dominant reactive mode leaves a diffuse porous-anode pattern and reorganizes into a bridge-like hotspot spanning the interface, the SEI, and the separator.

The model builds dense numerical-abscissa operators for a coupled anode-SEI-separator system with disorder and repeats symmetric eigensolves while carrying a threshold bracket across system sizes from N=64 to 2048. It is designed to detect a localization change in the dominant mode, not merely a change in overall growth rate.

That distinction matters because hotspot formation is a structural precursor to dangerous plating behavior. The experiment therefore targets the onset of concentrated interface damage in a dense finite-size setting that the script describes as not yet mapped through iterative deepening.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening, disorder averaging, and bisection on interfacial heterogeneity in an anode-SEI-separator operator.

What is measured: Critical heterogeneity threshold, hotspot transition score, interface-SEI-separator localization profile, dominant-mode behavior, disorder-averaged threshold estimate, and bracket width.