Quantum battery upends the rules of charging

ramon156

making the comparison to quantum computers seems odd. also i still have no idea how a quantum battery works after reading

IshKebab

One of those articles written by someone trying to explain a complex subject in simple terms when they don't understand it at all in the first place. Don't waste your time.

wg0

Not happening.

frotaur

'Quach' is an unfortunate name when researching new technologies...

xbmcuser

Now that standard LFP batteries can already charge in 5 to 10 minutes, and we will probably see 3 to 5 minutes in a few years with semi-solid and solid-state tech, anything faster feels like a marketing gimmick for most people. Sure, a battery might be able to take that much juice so quickly, but where are you actually going to get enough power to charge it that fast?

megous

Upends nothing yet, unless you live in 10e-9 sized world, at which point you likely don't care anyway. :)

Someone

FTA: - “at present, the prototype battery can only hold a very small amount of energy – a few billion electron volts – for a matter of nanoseconds” - “The key point is that quantum batteries are not about storing a great amount of energy, but about delivering it faster and with greater control” 1 Watt-hour is about 2 × 10²² electron volts. That’s a factor of about 10¹³/2⁴³. For the sake of an argument, let’s give this tech faster than Moore’s law growth, doubling in charge time and amount of charge every quarter. Then (if my math is right), we’ll have a 1Wh battery (about what an AAA battery stores) that holds its charge for about a day in 10 years. So, what is this useful for? It can discharge way faster than it gets charged, but don’t we have capacitors for that? Highly controlled discharging might give it niche applications, but otherwise, I wouldn’t hold my breath for this tech to power “or even your phone?”.

dguest

arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16541 note that whereas many preprints will be verbatim the same text, this one seems to be slightly different but it describes the same research.

teekert

A bigger battery is just more modules right? So (theoretically) large batteries charge at the same speed as small ones? You just just need more power than we can deliver though a cable in the time we want to charge them all to 100% at their maximum charging speed. How does "Quantum" solve that?

jillesvangurp

This sounds more like a capacitor than a battery. That might still be interesting but probably not for automotive applications any time soon. > Everyone knows that the larger the battery, the longer it takes to charge This is actually not entirely correct. Batteries are made out of cells. If you configure them in parallel, they can all charge at the same time. Increasing the number of cells doesn't increase the time to charge them. Also the charge time of individual cells has a lot to do with the chemistry of the battery. The so called C-rate is what matters here, this is the rate at which a battery charges/discharges its capacity. C rate of 1 means its capacity (e.g. 50kwh) is charged in an hour. State of the art batteries can charge at C rates up to 8-10 now, which means they charge well below 10 minutes. What matters here is how much power you can dump in a battery without damaging it. Also, the speed at which batteries charge is usually not linear. 10-80% is usually a lot faster than the last few percent. Some Chinese batteries get to 80% in as little as 3 minutes now. The remaining 20% can take another 6 minutes.

alasano

Put the battery in a box, when you open the box it's either charged or not charged. Get 7 boxes and 7 batteries and you have a 99% chance of getting a charged battery every morning.

1a527dd5

I think all of us have read tangentially related battery articles over the last decade. All of them promise new and magically. None have upturned the market. I remain sceptical.

formvoltron

or.. just swap the battery

logicallee

This is really interesting. I've been fascinated with new and unusual battery tech for a while. A few months ago I had one of the reasoning models crunch the numbers on using a superconductor as a battery.[1] (It's not viable.) Electric airplanes: the power density (per weight) of current batteries is very low compared with fuel, if you look at electric airplanes they are only able to make short flights due to the battery weight. If a quantum battery of large size could end up with a high all-in power density for the entire system, then it could power electric airplanes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731696

fHr

Quantum internet stack

cbondurant

I feel like (as is usual with nontechnical reporting on cutting edge science) this article isn't doing a great job at communicating the underlying tech well here. Had to independently look up some descriptions of what super absorption is, and what actually makes it a quantum effect. Sounds like the idea is, if you've got a bunch of light emitters spaced far closer to each other than the wavelength of light they are emitting, the light output becomes quadratic on the number of emitters. as opposed to linear on the number of emitters in the standard case. And the reverse becomes true as well. Based on that, I'm pessimistic on the potential of this, as it sounds like charging requires a conversion from electricity to light, and then discharging would also be a conversion from light back to electricity, and we don't exactly have the most lossless processes for that conversion. Maybe useful in certain kinds of optics or laser work though, where directly dumping the stored energy as light would be desired?

cogman10

I find this article pretty annoying and frankly just misleading trash. The author seems to clearly not know almost even the basics of batteries and power so they are trying to ham fistedly find applications for this device. With even the researcher telling them "This will probably never leave the lab". But a journalist has to sensationalize so "Imagine charging your ev in 2 seconds while you drive!" I mean, good on them for mentioning that the researcher is skeptical... but my god you should have actually double checked your understanding before writing the article (maybe ran it past the researcher first).

dreamcompiler

"The key point is that quantum batteries are not about storing a great amount of energy, but about delivering it faster and with greater control," says Ferraro. This is a description of a capacitor.