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I'm completely new to chemistry. I can’t personally figure out the basic issues myself, so I’m asking for your help. I became interested in how lithium-ion batteries generally work. As a result, I came to what is the most used material for the anode. This is LixC6. But I don't understand what its structure means, i.e. How do we even understand this? Why are there 3 dies here? What is 'x' in LixC6? Can you explain please. If the question is not clear enough, then let me know, because I really don’t know much about chemistry and I can ask quite stupid questions. 1

References
Image Source - Electronic structure ‘engineering’ in the development of materials for Li-ion and Na-ion batteries. Link
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The three "dies" (if you refer to the graphite planes on the left side of the picture that you provided) are just a convenient way to represent the graphite crystallographic lattice, see the picture below, from Wikipedia.

Graphite crystallographic structure

As for the x, my best guest would be that it represents a statistical fraction of Lithium ion presence. Id est in practice for a given carbon cycle ($\ce{C6}$) it is either 0 or 1, that is we either have $\ce{LiC6}$ or $\ce{C6}$. However, you can average this on your whole lattice. Hence if you have, say $\ce{Li_{0.5}C6}$, it would mean that half the vacancies in your graphite lattice are occupied with a lithium atom. Would you have $\ce{Li_{0.25}C6}$, it would be a quarter of the vacancies, etc.

EDIT: I found confirmation of this in [1], which also provided a figure similar to yours.

Li-Ion battery principle

References

[1] DM1 - Le lithium dans les accumulateurs Li-ion (Centrale PSI 2015), Archive

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    $\begingroup$ For future reference: for the body of questions, answers, and comments, chemistry.se offers to use mhchem as a comfortable method to add chemical equations. $\endgroup$
    – Buttonwood
    Commented Nov 30, 2023 at 17:27
  • $\begingroup$ @Buttonwood, I must admit that I do not see the interest of your 'edit' here... I mean: is this not completely equivalent to write $\ce{C6}$ or C$_6$ (first one written with ce, second one with basic LaTeX command)? I get the point that in case of long equations, using mhchem would proove meaningful, but in more basic cases I simply do not see the point... Am I missing something here? (I may be completely misled) $\endgroup$
    – mranvick
    Commented Dec 1, 2023 at 15:26
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    $\begingroup$ It was for consistency in the representation and to ease of reading without JS enabled. $\endgroup$
    – Buttonwood
    Commented Jan 5 at 14:04

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