Polaronic effects on lithium motion in intercalated perovskite lithium lanthanum titanate observed by 7Li NMR and impedance spectroscopy

The long-range and short-range motion of lithium ions into an electrochemically intercalated Li3xLa2/3-xTiO3 (LLTO) sintered pellet has been studied by ac impedance spectroscopy and Li-7 solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The temperature dependence of the de conductivity and the intercalation ratio dependence of the chemical shift, the relative intensity of the resonance line, the spin-lattice and the spin-spin relaxation times of 7Li NMR experiments are indicative of polaron formation at the initial stage of intercalation. The total de conductivity measured in the temperature range 45-600 K and the shape of the impedance diagrams show that after intercalation the conductivity is both ionic and electronic in nature. However for temperatures lower than 300 K the total conductivity is mainly dominated by the electronic one and for temperatures higher than 400 K the total conductivity is dominated by the ionic one. Moreover at low temperatures, when electronic conductivity dominates, the temperature dependence of the conductivity agrees well with a polaron model for conduction in these intercalated oxides. The NMR experiments clearly show that the resonance peak decreases strongly as intercalation occurs. This is explained by a coupling between the electronic and the Li+ nuclear spins leading to an unobservability of some Li+ nuclei in NMR. The other Li+ nuclei, which do not interact directly with the electronic spins, are responsible for the observed NMR signal. If the static effect of the intercalation is weak and leads to a very small chemical shift variation, variable temperature 7Li NMR spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation measurements show that the presence of electrons acts essentially on the dynamics of the Li+ nuclei through the lattice modification induced by the polaron formation. At the beginning of the intercalation the inverse of the relaxation time T-1 of the observed Lif nuclei decreases by one order of magnitude. At the same time the linewidth of the resonance peak (alpha 1/T-2) decreases abruptly. The motion of the lithium ions is sharply enhanced. For further intercalation, 1/T-1 decreases and the linewidth of the central peak increases indicating that the variations of the relaxation times are mostly governed by the variations of the spectral densities of the Li+ motion. Consequently, the lithium motion decreases gradually as intercalation proceeds. These results are in good agreement with a lattice modification due to polaron formation during intercalation.