Inside the CSIRO lab building, quantum battery prototypes. © CSIRO
You’re running late for an important appointment. Just as you’re about to leave, you realize your phone battery is dead.
Now imagine charging it almost instantly using the strange rules of quantum physics. That’s the idea behind quantum batteries.
Researchers at CSIRO have even built the first working prototypes, and the results are surprising.
You may have heard of odd quantum effects like superposition and entanglement, where tiny particles behave in unusual ways. These same effects could also power future technologies, like quantum computers that solve problems regular computers can’t.
One especially unusual feature is called “collective effects.” This is what makes quantum batteries different.
Instead of each part charging separately, all the units in a quantum battery can work together. Surprisingly, this means they charge faster as a group than they would individually.
For example, if a battery has N units and each normally takes one second to charge, then charging them together means each unit only takes 1/√N seconds.
So the bigger the battery, the faster it charges. If you double its size, the charging time drops to a bit more than half.
It’s almost like each unit “knows” the others are there and speeds things up. Strange, right?
This is completely different from regular batteries, where larger ones usually take longer to charge, like how a phone charges in about an hour, but an electric car can take all night.
James Quach Science Leader, Quantum Batteries Team, CSIRO
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