Lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries have arousing interest because of their high theoretical energy density. However, they often suffer from sluggish conversion of lithium polysulfides (LiPS) during the charge/discharge process. Single nickel (Ni) atoms on nitrogen‐doped graphene (Ni@NG) with Ni–N4 structure are prepared and introduced to modify the separators of Li–S batteries. The oxidized Ni sites of the Ni–N4 structure act as polysulfide traps, efficiently accommodating polysulfide ion electrons by forming strong Sx 2−⋅⋅⋅NiN bonding. Additionally, charge transfer between the LiPS and oxidized Ni sites endows the LiPS on Ni@NG with low free energy and decomposition energy barrier in an electrochemical process, accelerating the kinetic conversion of LiPS during the charge/discharge process. Furthermore, the large binding energy of LiPS on Ni@NG also shows its ability to immobilize the LiPS and further suppresses the undesirable shuttle effect. Therefore, a Li–S battery based on a Ni@NG modified separator exhibits excellent rate performance and stable cycling life with only 0.06% capacity decay per cycle. It affords fresh insights for developing single‐atom catalysts to accelerate the kinetic conversion of LiPS for highly stable Li–S batteries.

Two-dimensional stable metallic 1T-MoSe with expanded interlayer spacing of 10.0 Å in situ grown on SWCNTs film is fabricated via a one-step solvothermal method. Combined with X-ray absorption near-edge structures, our characterization reveals that such 1T-MoSe and single-walled carbon nanotubes (abbreviated as 1T-MoSe/SWCNTs) hybridized structure can provide strong electrical and chemical coupling between 1T-MoSe nanosheets and SWCNT film in a form of C-O-Mo bonding, which significantly benefits a high-efficiency electron/ion transport pathway and structural stability, thus directly enabling high-performance lithium storage properties. In particular, as a flexible and binder-free Li-ion anode, the 1T-MoSe/SWCNTs electrode exhibits excellent rate capacity, which delivers a capacity of 630 mAh/g at 3000 mA/g. Meanwhile, the strong C-O-Mo bonding of 1T-MoSe/SWCNTs accommodates volume alteration during the repeated charge/discharge process, which gives rise to 89% capacity retention and a capacity of 971 mAh/g at 300 mA/g after 100 cycles. This synthetic route of a multifunctional MoSe/SWCNTs hybrid might be extended to fabricate other 2D layer-based flexible and light electrodes for various applications such as electronics, optics, and catalysts.

Few-layer ternary FePS3 nanosheets, prepared via chemical vapor transport synthesis and ball-milling exfoliation, exhibit excellent electrocatalytic performance for the oxygen evolution reaction in an alkaline medium. Combined with first principles calculations, our X-ray spectroscopy and HRTEM results clearly reveal that the introduction of in-plane defects in FePS3 layers after exfoliation and formation of a FePS3-FeOOH heterostructure during the OER process largely contribute to the catalytic activity enhancement.