The finding that could change charging altogether is a battery that fills up faster as it gets larger.
If you have watched The Big Bang Theory (and you almost certainly have), you have heard the phrase “quantum mechanics” more times than you can count.
It is one of Sheldon Cooper’s favorites.
You already use it every day, of course, if you own a computer or a phone, or if you have ever had a laser procedure or an MRI.
All of that rests on findings from the branch of physics that explains how atoms and smaller particles (electrons, for instance) behave in the microworld, where energy does not flow freely but in small “packets” of energy, called quanta.
Put simply, in everyday life energy can rise or fall continuously, along a straight line, so to speak. In the quantum world, it jumps from one step to the next.
It is this same strange microworld that scientists have now drawn on to build the first prototype of a quantum battery.
As their published work describes, instead of relying on slow chemical reactions they used quantum effects to take in energy, with the result that the larger the battery, the faster it charges.
The paradox of the new battery
This breakthrough in energy storage belongs to Dr James Quach and his team, the Quantum Batteries Team, at CSIRO, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which handles scientific research and its commercial and industrial applications in the country.
Speaking to BBC Future, Dr Quach laid out the details, starting with the paradox of the new battery.
In conventional batteries, such as those in smartphones or electric cars, the greater the battery’s capacity, the longer it takes to recharge.
With the quantum battery, it is the other way around: as the size (the scale) of the system grows, charging speeds up, thanks to a quantum effect known as “super-absorption”.
The easiest way to see the difference is to think of filling a bottle from a tap.
With a lithium battery, the bigger the bottle, the longer you have to leave the tap open to fill it.
With a quantum battery, it is as if you plunged the bottle into an ocean, and it fills in milliseconds. The larger the bottle, the faster it draws the water in.
How the new battery works
Lithium batteries depend on chemical reactions, set off after atoms and electrons travel from one side of the battery to the other, through a liquid or solid material.
Along that path they meet resistance, they heat up, and that is how charging happens. The larger the battery, the more particles have to make the trip.
In the quantum world, particles do not travel from one point to another. A particle can sit in several states at once.
A quantum battery can therefore be empty and full at the same moment: it takes in energy at every possible level simultaneously, instead of filling up step by step.
That, in essence, is quantum superposition.
There is also quantum entanglement, which, in simple terms, happens when many molecules are quantum-linked to one another, stop acting as separate units, and behave like one giant atom.
The prototype the researchers built charges wirelessly through a laser, taking in the energy of light in an instant, in a single collective event.
What the quantum battery is for
The aim of the technology is, one day, to recharge electric cars faster than it takes to fill a petrol tank, or to charge devices instantly and without a cable.
It also offers an answer to the huge energy demands of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and data centers.
For now, the work is still at the proof-of-concept stage in the laboratory.
Today’s prototypes are very small and hold energy for only a short time, so there is still a long way to go before such batteries appear in commercial devices.
Even so, it is now clear that the theory works, and that is another milestone along the way.