The total curvature across the crystal is approximately 0.8 • , which is orders of magnitude higher than the limit for purely elastic and continuous deformation, given the known rigidity and yield stress of NMC. We can infer that at the atomic scale, a substantial quantity of defects are geometrically necessary to accommodate this distortion. The planar dislocations and antisite defects associated with bending and kinking in NMC are directly related to the formation of oxygen vacancies during crystal growth. Oxygen is unstable inside the lattice at the high temperatures needed for growing single crystal Ni-rich materials, and strain/defects indicate incomplete control over the oxygen atmosphere and temperature used during synthesis. Plastic distortion and internal stress could also be introduced during milling and grinding processes, which are sometimes applied between annealing steps to grow larger NMC crystals. The precise synthetic route of the NMC analyzed here cannot be disclosed, which is a common limitation when evaluating state-of-the-art commercial battery materials. While SXDM allows structural heterogeneity at the intra-particle level to be discerned, it is always necessary to understand the inter- intensity and d-spacing maps for each particle without normalization are displayed in Figure . The pole figures associated with Figure are given in Figure .