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.
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)
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.
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.
- “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?”.
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.
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.
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."
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
Mine takes around an hour and a half from zero to 80% and just over an hour the rest of the way. In general, I find it rather unpleasant when the last 20% takes almost as long as the preceding 80%. I usually only charge to just above 90% though because going above disables features.
2025 Subaru Solterra. It's essentially the same as the 2022 model, and I juust managed to miss the new 2026 model that is better at everything except physical controls
This was one of Toyota's first BEVs (Subaru's EVs are all based on Toyota). It keeps trying to pretend to be an ICE vehicle and that pisses me off. (forward creep, no one-pedal driving, accelerator constantly modifies or ignores my input...) If it weren't a lease, I would pull it apart and hack the control units.
Rule of thumb: ANY li-ion cell (or battery of cells) can charge from ~20 to ~70% in under 20 minutes. If not, the charging is not done correctly (either you're limited by the charger or the cooling of the battery)
For some value of "correct" but not others. For EV's, most of the time, the "correct" thing to do is to plug it in overnight, and let the software do the rest to optimise charging. Which might look something like:
Charging to start at midnight (or whenever the cheap rate starts) and complete by 7am (or usual wakeup time) and minimise wear by charging below a fastest rate, and take the battery level from where it is now (e.g. 50%) to the configured stopping point (e.g. 80%)
This is clearly different from "charge as fast as possible and be done in 20 minutes". Although that is occasionally the requirement. But not most of the time.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, 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
Oh I totally agree. That was my point. Someone hired as a scientific reporter should be able to do as good or better than an LLM. The fact that they were far worse is an indictment.
"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.
ramon156 | 17 hours ago
IshKebab | 17 hours ago
weatherlite | 17 hours ago
lukan | 17 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
wg0 | 17 hours ago
tclancy | 16 hours ago
frotaur | 17 hours ago
xbmcuser | 17 hours ago
elAhmo | 17 hours ago
Even if the technology exist, it will take a while for infra to follow.
consp | 17 hours ago
xbmcuser | 17 hours ago
lnenad | 17 hours ago
nightfly | 17 hours ago
The future of gas stations
megous | 17 hours ago
Someone | 17 hours ago
- “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 | 17 hours ago
RA2lover | 17 hours ago
msandford | 17 hours ago
kirrent | 16 hours ago
tyho | 16 hours ago
smallerize | 16 hours ago
dguest | 17 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
deadbunny | 17 hours ago
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."
jillesvangurp | 17 hours ago
> 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 | 17 hours ago
cogman10 | 16 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
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.
cogman10 | 16 hours ago
misnome | 16 hours ago
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
cogman10 | 16 hours ago
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)
LoganDark | 9 hours ago
LoganDark | 15 hours ago
LoganDark | 15 hours ago
cogman10 | 15 hours ago
It's really strange how much these older manufacturers struggle to make a good EV.
LoganDark | 14 hours ago
Gabrys1 | 15 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom | 14 hours ago
For some value of "correct" but not others. For EV's, most of the time, the "correct" thing to do is to plug it in overnight, and let the software do the rest to optimise charging. Which might look something like:
Charging to start at midnight (or whenever the cheap rate starts) and complete by 7am (or usual wakeup time) and minimise wear by charging below a fastest rate, and take the battery level from where it is now (e.g. 50%) to the configured stopping point (e.g. 80%)
This is clearly different from "charge as fast as possible and be done in 20 minutes". Although that is occasionally the requirement. But not most of the time.
bluGill | 16 hours ago
mschuster91 | 16 hours ago
Delivery drivers are single shift and usually only drive very short distances, which means these vehicles mostly see a slow trickle charge over night.
bluGill | 15 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 2 hours ago
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.
alasano | 17 hours ago
Get 7 boxes and 7 batteries and you have a 99% chance of getting a charged battery every morning.
inigyou | 17 hours ago
In which case you may as well remove all that and just set the charger to "on".
tclancy | 16 hours ago
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
layer8 | 16 hours ago
simonh | 16 hours ago
1a527dd5 | 17 hours ago
I remain sceptical.
a3w | 17 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom | 12 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago
muyuu | 17 hours ago
this system does work for mopeds in Taiwan though (Gogoro)
logicallee | 17 hours ago
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
luckystarr | 16 hours ago
fHr | 16 hours ago
cbondurant | 16 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
But I agree, this article is trash. This is simply very bad journalism.
cogman10 | 16 hours ago
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 | 16 hours ago
cogman10 | 16 hours ago
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 | 15 hours ago
cogman10 | 15 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 2 hours ago
This is a description of a capacitor.