It has been revealed that there’s a mind-blowing type of quantum battery that could offer a new kind of energy storage. Check out the latest reports about this below.
Quantum batteries
A battery stores charged ions that move in one direction when it’s being charged and in the opposite direction when it’s being used.
However, some ions get diverted along the way, which results in the battery losing its capacity to store energy.
To overcome this problem, physicists are exploring new ways of storing energy in portable devices by leveraging a strange quantum phenomenon that involves the twisting of time and 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.
Chen and physicist Gaoyan Zhu of the Beijing Computational Science Research Centre, along with their colleagues, have collaborated on a new project to investigate the possibility of developing a quantum battery that can facilitate simultaneous charging stages, thus enhancing energy storage and thermal efficiency.
“While chemical batteries are governed by classical laws of physics, microscopic particles are quantum in nature, so we have a chance to explore ways of using them that bend or even break our intuitive notions of what takes place at small scales,” Chen says.
Back in 2019, a group of Canadian researchers proposed a theoretical blueprint for a quantum battery that could remain charged indefinitely.
The concept is based on a unique quantum mechanism that involves enticing quantum components into a ‘dark state’. In this state, the material becomes isolated from its environment and cannot interact or lose energy to it. However, the idea is still in its theoretical stage.
We suggest that you check out more details about this interesting matter in the original post shared by Science Alert.
