Harnessing Steric Separation of Freshly Nucleated Li2S Nanoparticles for Bottom‐Up Assembly of High‐Performance Cathodes for Lithium‐Sulfur and Lithium‐Ion Batteries

A nanostructured C-Li2S composite nanopowder is prepared via a scalable, high-throughput solution-processing method based on the steric separation of freshly nucleated Li2S nanoparticles and their self-assembling. Each 100–200 nm particle is composed of smaller 5–20 nm Li2S nanoparticles uniformly distributed within a rigid carbon matrix. When used as a cathode material for Li cells, this composite demonstrates high rate performance, near-theoretical capacity utilization, and excellent cycle stability.