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.
Yeah, 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.
My car takes 240KW (It still feels insane to be delivering that much power) and 10-80% (56KWh) is about 15 minutes and 80-100% is another 15-20 minutes
That's why I find a car that only accepts 60kW and charges for 3 hours to be odd. Even if I limited my car to only 60kW, it'd take about 1 hour and 4 minutes to get 80% and another 20 minutes for the remaining 20%. So around 1 1/2 hours
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.
That is one type of delivery. I know someone who specializes in cross US deliveries. There are some niches where only the original counts and they don't trust it to a standard delivery, so it gets driven in a car. truck drivers also count as a delivery. I used to have a friend who installed paint booth to automotive body shops - a special skill that had him drive all over the US to wherever the next job was
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.
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.
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.
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)
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."
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).
This 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
You have a 180KWh battery that only takes 60KW? What are you driving? That's a weird configuration.
Most of that time could well be the last ~20%
My car takes 240KW (It still feels insane to be delivering that much power) and 10-80% (56KWh) is about 15 minutes and 80-100% is another 15-20 minutes
Mine is the same.
That's why I find a car that only accepts 60kW and charges for 3 hours to be odd. Even if I limited my car to only 60kW, it'd take about 1 hour and 4 minutes to get 80% and another 20 minutes for the remaining 20%. So around 1 1/2 hours
(edit: fixing numbers)
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.
> but if you travel constantly (that is a delivery driver) this becomes an important economics question since the battery will wear out faster.
Delivery drivers are single shift and usually only drive very short distances, which means these vehicles mostly see a slow trickle charge over night.
That is one type of delivery. I know someone who specializes in cross US deliveries. There are some niches where only the original counts and they don't trust it to a standard delivery, so it gets driven in a car. truck drivers also count as a delivery. I used to have a friend who installed paint booth to automotive body shops - a special skill that had him drive all over the US to wherever the next job was
This is true. Additionally, configuring them in series, they can all charge at the same time, it just requires a higher voltage charger.
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.
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.
Yes 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
Only 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".
Now all we need is to invent an Elitzur-Vaidman battery charge tester to work out which box to open.
If you entangle two batteries with opposite charge, you only need these two.
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?”.
All we have to do is improve it by about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000x and it might be able to power a phone for 1 second
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.
Systems such as this might be useful as an in situ energy source you can couple to quantum gates for gate driving.
It's also stores and releases light, not electricity, a bit like luminous paint, less like a battery or a capacitor.
Can it be scaled small enough to replace capacitors in DRAM?
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 remain sceptical.
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.
That still seems like a crazy deal, where are such cheap batteries?
To 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.
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?
> but where are you actually going to get enough power to charge it that fast?
The future of gas stations
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.
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.
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)
'Quach' is an unfortunate name when researching new technologies...
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?
From 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."
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.
making the comparison to quantum computers seems odd. also i still have no idea how a quantum battery works after reading
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).
It'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
This 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.
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!
Isn'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."
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.
Quantum internet stack
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
What was the minimum required density you derived?
Upends nothing yet, unless you live in 10e-9 sized world, at which point you likely don't care anyway. :)
or.. just swap the battery
yep, 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)
Not happening.
For some observers, yes.