Gallium-based room-temperature liquid metals in lithium batteries: Mechanisms, challenges, and prospects

With the rapid development of flexible electronics and wearable devices, lithium batteries face critical challenges including large electrode volume expansion (up to 300%), unstable electrode–electrolyte interfaces, lithium dendrite formation, and thermal management issues. Gallium-based room-temperature liquid metals (RTLMs), featuring intrinsic fluidity, self-healing ability, and high electrical conductivity (up to 10⁴ S cm⁻¹), offer a promising strategy to address these limitations. This review systematically summarizes the application of RTLMs in lithium batteries, encompassing their roles as electrodes, electrolytes and interfacial layers, current collectors, and thermal management components. We analyze the underlying mechanisms, including reversible alloying reactions, interface stabilization, and enhanced thermal conduction, that enable their unique performance. Furthermore, the review highlights current challenges in mechanistic understanding and complex interface engineering, and outlines future directions such as intelligent, responsive liquid-metal composites and efficient recycling technologies. This work provides a theoretical framework for the rational design of next-generation high-performance, flexible lithium batteries.