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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.
> 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.
Correct. In principle if you have enough current available you can charge several thousand 18650 cells in the same time it takes to charge one. But you also need low-loss switching to reconfigure all the batteries to be parallel and monitor them all for rate of charge, voltage, and temperature. The electronics needed are buildable but not trivial.
There is one other consideration. Sure we can charge some batteries at C rates of 10 - but should we. Often the cell will take it, but you damage the cell and so you lower your lifespan. If you are on a road trip once in a while this isn't a big deal, but if you travel constantly (that is a delivery driver) this becomes an important economics question since the battery will wear out faster.
Has anyone actually got wear data on this? EV manufacturers publish cycle life at 1C but not much at 5-10C fast charging over thousands of cycles. Without that, "damages the cell" is just intuition — could be 5% capacity loss over a lifetime, could be 40%.
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?
My reading between the lines of the article is that the application would likely be in quantum computing circuits. Where it can be tricky to deliver and store power because everything is supercomputing icebergs.
But I agree, this article is trash. This is simply very bad journalism.
Also, anyone else notice the use of the word “tricksy”? Not that it’s wrong, you just don’t see it a lot outside of people who think they’re good at Gollum impressions disproving the fact. https://www.etymonline.com/word/tricksy
- “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?”.
Moore's law doesn't even apply yet because they're still testing tiny individual devices. If this get funding it's going to be way faster at first. Integrating the electronics and putting 2^10 of them on a wafer knocks 10 doublings off the top.
At this point I already have "ad blindness" but towards "traditional news publication declaring some technology revolutionary" — probability of thw mentioned tech being a nothing burger is just getting closer and closer to 100% with every publication.
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 don't know about you, but I can now buy a safe, cheap battery for my solar installation, less than 250€ for 2kWh.
Somehow, some of the breakthroughs talked about in those countless breathless articles over the last decade must indeed have arrived eventually. And with sodium ion etc. this impressive development will continue.
PS: This article in particular seemed to be very early research.
> related battery articles over the last decade. All of them promise new and magically. None have upturned the market
Yeah but nah. I think there are at least 2 things going on
1) articles tend to hype.
2) Only a small percent of "lab breakthroughs" translate into real-world performance gains in production systems, and they do not do so immediately. But the fact of the matter is that there have been a large number of lab breakthroughs in batteries - this indicates what a key and productive area it is. A small percent of a large number is still an appreciable number.
If you think that batteries are much the same as 10 years ago, you're wrong. If you think they won't improve a lot in the next ten years, wrong again. Would you notice an "upturned market" if it happens over that timescale? - That's how real change, not hype comes.
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?
Half an hour for a full charge would be fine for a break during the trip, but even those chargers are not always reliable or available. I think we are very far away from charging being measured in single digit minutes.
Even if the technology exist, it will take a while for infra to follow.
A week ago I traveled partly through Germany. On the highway stops we stopped (5 in total) only one had a working charging station and that one was only a single cable. There is a long way to go. It's probably better off the track though. (Don't need to charge but since I have a plug-in hybrid I do abuse the good parking spots if need be)
I think as with most human undertakings, building isn't too much of a problem. Maintaining is. Even with what is still a relatively tame number of chargers you get a large number of them that are broken.
That is in the US but they are becoming very common in China and now that they bringing these chargers to Europe and rest of the world I think US might be the only one left out.
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.
Never seen a number posted anywhere, that's the tell. Papers love "orders of magnitude faster charging" and go real quiet on Wh/kg. Guessing it's not close.
"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.
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?
It's superabsorption that's responsible for the battery's most surprising property. In classical physics, molecules are little individualists – each acting on its own and absorbing energy at a rate independent of the molecules around it. But with quantum effects, they're a little more collectivist: they "act in unison and synergise", says Quach. "So that the rate at which you can absorb energy increases with the number of molecules there are."
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.
What's hard to understand? Quantum charging means it both charges and not charges your car at the same time. You then get and not get to work on time. Really good progress!
Anyway, the important part about the tech in its current state:
"However, at present, the prototype battery can only hold a very small amount of energy – a few billion electron volts – for a matter of nanoseconds. To power conventional devices, it would need to store far more energy for far longer."
Also not helped by the need for science communicatio. to always justify itself with description of potential applications, even when they're really far from any practical application.
Ran into this same skepticism with a friend who works in error-correction research. His take: the "charges faster when bigger" effect (superabsorption) is real physics from a 2020 Kockum/Quach paper, but journalists always skip that it needs coherence across cells, which decoheres fast at any real scale. Worth reading the actual paper instead of the writeup.
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).
The scaling result itself isn't new — collective charging advantages for quantum batteries have been predicted theoretically since around 2015 (Dicke-model superradiance arguments). What's notable here is an actual solid-state demonstration of it, not just simulations. Still nanosecond-scale and tiny energy, so "upends the rules" is doing a lot of work in that headline.
> 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.