Silicon is a staple of the digital revolution, shunting loads of signals on a device that's likely just inches from your eyes at this very moment.

Now, that same plentiful, cheap material is becoming a serious candidate for a big role in the burgeoning battery business. It's especially attractive because it's able to hold 10 times as much energy in an important part of a battery, the , than widely used graphite.

But not so fast. While has a swell reputation among scientists, the material itself swells when it's part of a battery. It swells so much that the anode flakes and cracks, causing the battery to lose its ability to hold a charge and ultimately to fail.

Now scientists have witnessed the process for the first time, an important step toward making silicon a viable choice that could improve the cost, performance and charging speed of batteries for electric vehicles as well as cell phones, laptops, smart watches and other gadgets.

"Many people have imagined what might be happening but no one had actually demonstrated it before," said Chongmin Wang, a scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Wang is a corresponding author of the paper recently published in Nature Nanotechnology.

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