Intercalation processes in functional materials

This collection brings together forefront advances in intercalation chemistry across solid‑state hosts where guest insertion modulates structure, electronic states, ionic transport, and thermodynamic stability. The aim is to highlight evolving concepts, non‑equilibrium behaviour, and characterisation or modelling approaches that shed new light on insertion processes in layered, tunnelled, and low‑dimensional materials. Studies tackling long‑standing challenges such as synthesis, multivalent transport, metastability, phase complexity, and degradation pathways are particularly encouraged.

The topics published in this collection may include, but are not limited to:

• Cationic, anionic, multivalent, and neutral‑species intercalation into inorganic hosts, including transition‑metal oxides, chalcogenides, pnictides, carbons, MXenes, Prussian‑blue analogues, and related solid‑state materials
• Electrochemical intercalation used purely as a means of driving structural and compositional transformations in solids (excluding device‑focused studies such as batteries or supercapacitors)
• Redox processes, charge compensation pathways, electronic structure evolution, polaronic effects, and defect chemistry associated with intercalation
• Structural dynamics including staging, layer gliding, stacking rearrangements, breathing, amorphisation, strain development, and topotactic transformations
• In situ and operando methods (diffraction, spectroscopy, microscopy, scattering, multi‑modal synchronised probes) for resolving insertion processes
• Computational approaches such as DFT, molecular dynamics, kinetic modelling, and machine‑learning‑enabled predictions of intercalation energetics and stability
• Emergent or unconventional behaviour arising from disorder, dimensionality, interfacial complexity, strain, and extreme electrochemical or environmental conditions

Manuscripts should be submitted via our online submission service. Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection in response to the open call.

The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check the suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal's usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Materials Advances.