Thermal Raman study of Li4Ti5O12 and discussion about the number of its characteristic bands

Lithium battery industry is booming, and this fast growth should be supported by developing industry friendly tools to control the quality of positive and negative electrode materials. Raman spectroscopy was shown to be a cost effective and sensitive instrument to study defects and heterogeneities in lithium titanate, popular negative electrode material for high power applications, but there are still some points to be clarified. This work presents a detailed thermal Raman study for lithium titanate and discusses the difference of the number of predicted and experimentally observed Raman-active bands. The low temperature study and the analysis of thermal shifts of bands positions during heating let us to conclude about advantages of the proposed approach with surplus bands and recommend using shifts of major band to estimate the sample heating.