Electro-precipitation via oxygen reduction: a new technique for thin film manganese oxide deposition

Manganese oxide was deposited from a non-aqueous solution, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), via the reduction of dissolved oxygen. The formed superoxide radical ion (O2c) reacts rapidly with the manganese ions forming a smooth and thin film (80 nm) of manganese oxide. From an in situ EQCM study, it could be concluded that MnO2 was the most probable oxide which was deposited at an average growth rate of 0.049 mg s1 or 0.077 nm s1 . Since the direct deposition of a phase pure MnO2 layer was not confirmed by XRD, it is more likely that a variety of manganese oxides has been deposited during the electro-precipitation reaction and thus further optimization or post-treatments are required to obtain an active manganese oxide layer for thin film deposits. The key property of this new deposition technique is the self-limiting behavior, proven by rotating ring-disk electrode experiments. This is crucial to electrodeposit thin films conformally on high aspect ratio structures for 3D all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries or supercapacitors.crosscheck: This document is CrossCheck deposited related_data: Supplementary Information identifier: Felix Mattelaer (ORCID) copyright_licence: The Royal Society of Chemistry has an exclusive publication licence for this journal copyright_licence: This article is freely available. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) history: Received 26 April 2016; Accepted 4 August 2016; Accepted Manuscript published 4 August 2016; Advance Article published 17 August 2016; Version of Record published 30 August 2016status: publishe