1. Introduction

Synchrotron radiation is emitted by charged particles, traveling at speeds relative to the speed of light when accelerated by magnetic fields. The major advantages of synchrotron radiation include very high intensity, tunable energy range, and inherently linear polarization [1]. However, one major drawback is the limited availability of the national and international

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

synchrotron radiation facilities. The availability of synchrotron radiation, with its characteristics of high brilliance, particular collimation, and multi-wavelength accessibility, continues to drive technical and theoretical advances in scattering and spectroscopy techniques. An exciting area being developed is the exploitation of these advances in synchrotron radiation surface and bulk-specific probe techniques to study the underpinning issues of energy storage materials.

The long-term endurance of batteries and other electrochemical devices, used in highly demanding applications like electric vehicles, is closely related to the ability of the cathode and anode materials to accommodate and release guest ions without any structural damage. A challenge in developing the understanding of energy storage process in batteries is in the direct study of the electrochemical reactions involved during battery operation. The characterization tool required needs to provide element-specific as well as overall structural information with high resolution. Synchrotron radiation-based measurements under operating conditions of batteries are critical in order to map the mechanistic causality between the local and atomic structure of functional components of batteries and their electrochemical characteristics. In this chapter, we will examine various scenarios where synchrotron radiation-based X-ray methods provide inherent advantages and flexibility in obtaining detailed mechanistic information along with structural studies.
