Horizontal Growth of Lithium on Parallelly Aligned MXene Layers towards Dendrite-Free Metallic Lithium Anodes

Although metallic lithium is an extremely promising anode for lithium-based batteries due to its high theoretical capacity, the uncontrollable growth of lithium dendrites, in particular under deep stripping and plating, have stagnated its application. It is demonstrated that parallelly aligned MXene (Ti₃C₂T_x) layers enable the efficient guiding of lithium nucleation and growth on the surface of 2D MXene nanosheets, giving rise to horizontal-growth lithium anodes. Moreover, the inherent fluorine terminations in MXene afford a uniform and durable solid electrolyte interface with lithium fluoride at the anode/electrolyte interface, efficiently regulating electromigration of lithium ions. Thus, a dendrite-free lithium anode with a long cycle life up to 900 h and excellent deep stripping–plating capabilities up to 35 mAh cm⁻² is achieved, which can further serve as an anode for a lithium metal battery, exhibiting high cycle stability up to 1000 cycles.