Rendered at 21:31:46 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
jillesvangurp 10 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Gabrys1 7 hours ago [-]
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)
SideburnsOfDoom 7 hours ago [-]
> If not, the charging is not done correctly
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.
LoganDark 9 hours 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.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
You have a 180KWh battery that only takes 60KW? What are you driving? That's a weird configuration.
misnome 9 hours ago [-]
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
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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)
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
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.
LoganDark 7 hours ago [-]
I usually charge from less than 10% to near 90%. Lower than 10 and the motors reduce output, higher than 93 and regenerative braking shuts off
LoganDark 7 hours ago [-]
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
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
Oh wow. I didn't know Subaru made EVs... and I can see why. That's horrible.
It's really strange how much these older manufacturers struggle to make a good EV.
LoganDark 7 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bluGill 8 hours ago [-]
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
mrarson 9 hours ago [-]
This is true. Additionally, configuring them in series, they can all charge at the same time, it just requires a higher voltage charger.
cbondurant 9 hours ago [-]
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?
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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.
alasano 10 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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".
tclancy 9 hours ago [-]
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
simonh 9 hours ago [-]
Now all we need is to invent an Elitzur-Vaidman battery charge tester to work out which box to open.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
If you entangle two batteries with opposite charge, you only need these two.
Someone 10 hours ago [-]
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?”.
msandford 9 hours ago [-]
All we have to do is improve it by about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000x and it might be able to power a phone for 1 second
kirrent 9 hours ago [-]
Systems such as this might be useful as an in situ energy source you can couple to quantum gates for gate driving.
smallerize 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tyho 9 hours ago [-]
It's also stores and releases light, not electricity, a bit like luminous paint, less like a battery or a capacitor.
RA2lover 10 hours ago [-]
Can it be scaled small enough to replace capacitors in DRAM?
floppyd 10 hours ago [-]
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.
1a527dd5 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Tepix 9 hours ago [-]
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.
smallerize 9 hours ago [-]
That still seems like a crazy deal, where are such cheap batteries?
a3w 9 hours ago [-]
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours 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.
xbmcuser 10 hours ago [-]
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?
nightfly 10 hours ago [-]
> but where are you actually going to get enough power to charge it that fast?
The future of gas stations
elAhmo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
lnenad 10 hours ago [-]
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.
xbmcuser 10 hours ago [-]
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.
consp 10 hours ago [-]
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)
frotaur 10 hours ago [-]
'Quach' is an unfortunate name when researching new technologies...
ramon156 10 hours ago [-]
making the comparison to quantum computers seems odd. also i still have no idea how a quantum battery works after reading
teekert 10 hours ago [-]
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?
deadbunny 10 hours ago [-]
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."
note that whereas many preprints will be verbatim the same text, this one seems to be slightly different but it describes the same research.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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).
dwedge 8 hours ago [-]
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
cogman10 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dwedge 7 hours ago [-]
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
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
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.
fHr 9 hours ago [-]
Quantum internet stack
logicallee 10 hours ago [-]
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.
What was the minimum required density you derived?
megous 10 hours ago [-]
Upends nothing yet, unless you live in 10e-9 sized world, at which point you likely don't care anyway. :)
IshKebab 10 hours ago [-]
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.
weatherlite 10 hours ago [-]
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!
lukan 10 hours ago [-]
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."
rcxdude 9 hours ago [-]
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.
formvoltron 10 hours ago [-]
or.. just swap the battery
muyuu 9 hours ago [-]
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(edit: fixing numbers)
It's really strange how much these older manufacturers struggle to make a good EV.
Delivery drivers are single shift and usually only drive very short distances, which means these vehicles mostly see a slow trickle charge over night.
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?
But I agree, this article is trash. This is simply very bad journalism.
Get 7 boxes and 7 batteries and you have a 99% chance of getting a charged battery every morning.
In which case you may as well remove all that and just set the charger to "on".
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?”.
I remain sceptical.
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.
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.
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.
The future of gas stations
Even if the technology exist, it will take a while for infra to follow.
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."
note that whereas many preprints will be verbatim the same text, this one seems to be slightly different but it describes the same research.
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).
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.
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
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."
this system does work for mopeds in Taiwan though (Gogoro)