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Quantum battery upends the rules of charging
- ramon156 1mo agomaking the comparison to quantum computers seems odd. also i still have no idea how a quantum battery works after reading
- IshKebab 1mo agoOne 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.
- weatherlite 1mo agoWhat'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!
- lukan 1mo agoIsn't that how average journalism works? 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."
- rcxdude 1mo agoAlso 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.
- wg0 1mo agoNot happening.
- tclancy 1mo agoFor some observers, yes.
- frotaur 1mo ago'Quach' is an unfortunate name when researching new technologies...
- xbmcuser 1mo agoNow 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?
- elAhmo 1mo agoHalf 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.
- consp 1mo agoA 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)
- xbmcuser 1mo agoThat 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.
- lnenad 1mo agoI 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.
- nightfly 1mo ago> but where are you actually going to get enough power to charge it that fast? The future of gas stations
- megous 1mo agoUpends nothing yet, unless you live in 10e-9 sized world, at which point you likely don't care anyway. :)
- Someone 1mo agoFTA: - “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?”.
- floppyd 1mo agoAt 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.
- RA2lover 1mo agoCan it be scaled small enough to replace capacitors in DRAM?
- msandford 1mo agoAll we have to do is improve it by about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000x and it might be able to power a phone for 1 second
- kirrent 1mo agoSystems such as this might be useful as an in situ energy source you can couple to quantum gates for gate driving.
- tyho 1mo agoIt's also stores and releases light, not electricity, a bit like luminous paint, less like a battery or a capacitor.
- dguest 1mo agoarXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16541 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 1mo agoA 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?
- deadbunny 1mo agoFrom TFA: 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."
- dist-epoch 1mo ago[dead]
- jillesvangurp 1mo agoThis 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.
- mrarson 1mo agoThis is true. Additionally, configuring them in series, they can all charge at the same time, it just requires a higher voltage charger.
- cogman10 1mo agoYeah, it was a pretty silly and annoying opening to the article. Power is the only reason there's any difference in charge time for any of these devices. The reason their laptop is taking so long to charge is because they are likely using a phone charger on it. The reason an EV can't change in an hour is because nobody installs L3 chargers on their homes. The only reason it's related at all to battery size is because larger batteries need higher power levels in order to charge in an hour. I'm hand-waving a bit over chemistry because you are entirely right about the C rating.
- LoganDark 1mo ago> The reason an EV can't change in an hour is because nobody installs L3 chargers on their homes. The reason my EV can't charge in an hour is because it won't accept more than around 60KW, which charges it in about 3 hours.
- alasano 1mo agoPut 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.
- inigyou 1mo agoOnly if you put it in a box with a battery charger that turns on if a radioactive particle decays. In which case you may as well remove all that and just set the charger to "on".
- tclancy 1mo agoYes but you know how cats like to sit in boxes. 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 https://www.etymonline.com/word/tricksy
- layer8 1mo agoIf you entangle two batteries with opposite charge, you only need these two.
- simonh 1mo agoNow all we need is to invent an Elitzur-Vaidman battery charge tester to work out which box to open.
- 1a527dd5 1mo agoI 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.
- a3w 1mo agoTo be fair, batteries are now insanely good. And were not in the past. But it seems we got increments of all technologies use in parallel. Instead of a revolution, yet this is still netting more-than-linear growth in most of human power use.
- Tepix 1mo agoI 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.
- smallerize 1mo agoThat still seems like a crazy deal, where are such cheap batteries?
- Tepix 1mo agoSeen on German deal sites for Marstek B2500D.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1mo ago> 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.
- formvoltron 1mo agoor.. just swap the battery
- muyuu 1mo agoyep, maybe when they're not 800kg devices that need to stay solidly in place under the forces you experience in a car this system does work for mopeds in Taiwan though (Gogoro)
- logicallee 1mo agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731696
- luckystarr 1mo agoWhat was the minimum required density you derived?
- fHr 1mo agoQuantum internet stack
- cbondurant 1mo agoI 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 1mo agoMy 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.
- cogman10 1mo agoI 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).
- dwedge 1mo agoIt's sad to see over the past six months or so how even the BBC is resorting more and more to sensationalism and LLM-style writing
- cogman10 1mo agoThis is one of those cases where an LLM does a better job. I prompted sonnet with 'Write a news article about "quantum batteries"' and included the names of the researchers and it wrote a better and more accurate article than the BBC article. It looked up the published articles and dumbed them down but also didn't misrepresent the facts. Here's just one paragraph from the output. > That framing matters for where the technology might actually end up first. Rather than replacing the battery in your laptop, quantum batteries are more likely to find a niche whenever a system needs an extremely fast, tightly controlled burst of energy on a very small scale — potentially useful for future quantum computers or quantum sensors that already operate in the same ultra-cold, carefully isolated environments these batteries require.
- dwedge 1mo agoSure, but you don't work for the BBC. It's acceptable that it does a better job than you, it isn't acceptable that it did a better job than a journalist on the BBC payroll
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- dreamcompiler 1mo ago"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.
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