Quantum Batteries Could Provide a New Kind of Energy Storage by Messing With Time

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Quantum Batteries Could Provide a New Kind of Energy Storage by Messing With Time​

In a typical battery, charged ions zip one way through a sea of other particles as the battery recharges, before racing back in the other direction to release the stored energy on cue.

Back and forth the ions go, some getting diverted along the way, until the capacity of the battery is drained, and it loses energy too quickly to be of any use.

But physicists, good on them, are imagining new ways of storing energy in handy portable devices by drawing on a strange quantum phenomenon that twists time, amongst other unusual happenings.

"Current batteries for low-power devices, such as smartphones or sensors, typically use chemicals such as lithium to store charge, whereas a quantum battery uses microscopic particles like arrays of atoms," explains Yuanbo Chen, a physics graduate student at the University of Tokyo.

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... Their idea, which is still totally theoretical, hinges on a different quantum mechanism: one that involves luring quantum components into a 'dark state' where the material can't interact with, or lose energy to, its environment. ...

Imagine a quantum battery that is also quantum entangled so that it doesn't need to be physically next to the machine it is powering. We could build battery powered spaceships that don't carry batteries/fuel.