"Energy" is an important concept in physics and chemistry. More importantly, electric energy is extremely crucial in our daily lives in many applications. In transportation, the development of electric vehicles is surging since the last few years. To implement the lithium battery systems in transportation for electric vehicles, however, there are still many challenging technical issues to address for meeting automobiles' stringent requirements on high energy density, long cycle life, excellent safety, and wide operating temperature range. Among the current state-of-the-art beyond Li-ion battery technologies, Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) battery is one of the promising high-energy density battery system, with several technical challenges (e.g. polysulfides dissolution, electrolytes degradation, low electrical conductivity of lithium sulfides, etc.) hindering the further applications of this technology. To overcome these challenges with in depth materials research, atomistic simulations can provide accurate and timely solutions to complement with experimental efforts. To address this issue, I will share with you some of my thoughts and our recent works in Li-S batteries using first-principles and molecular dynamics methods to address some related important research problems in this talk.

Dr. Kah Chun Lau is an assistant professor in Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State University Northridge. Dr. Lau obtained his PhD degree in Physics from Michigan Technological University in 2007. After graduation, he conducted his postdoctoral research at U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory respectively, and joined California State University Northridge in 2016. Currently Dr. Lau's research focuses are atomistic simulation of novel materials and interfaces properties in energy storage and conversion devices, condensed matter theory, model and simulation method developments in materials science.