MIT News  July 23, 2024 A quantitative understanding of the physical traits of a material that regulates proton diffusion is necessary for accelerating the discovery of fast proton conductors which is key for advancing many electrochemical technologies. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Auburn University, Northwestern University) mapped the structural, chemical and dynamic properties of solid acids to the elementary steps of the Grotthuss mechanism of proton diffusion by combining ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, analysis of phonon spectra and atomic structure calculations. They identified the donor–hydrogen bond lengths and the acidity of polyanion groups as key descriptors […]