One way for human civilization to turn to renewable energy is through different types of power sources. These power sources use electricity as the main energy carrier, which leads to a number of research being done on how this can be achieved.
The change to electric vehicles has been swift, with millions of cars being sold annually.
Elon Musk was propelled into the wealthiest man in the world after he built Tesla, which is one of the fastest growing sectors of electric cars.
Unlike traditional cars, electric vehicles use batteries as their power source. Electric cars are range-challenged until the battery technology improved, but now they can have the same driving distance of gasoline-burning cars.
One of the biggest hurdles in developing electric cars was improving battery storage technology.
Despite the vast improvements in battery technology, the charging speed for these electric cars is much more tedious than typical gas vehicles. Consumers face the difficulty of slow charging speeds at home, but it takes a little longer when using a charger at one of the stations.
The scientists found quantum physics to be a way to address charging issues. Their findings led them to believe that quantum technology may help charge batteries faster.
Alicki and Fannes proposed the concept of quantum battery in 2012. Their paper theorizes that quantum resources such as entanglement can be used to charge all batteries at once, which would make charging a lot faster and sustainable.
Modern batteries have cells that can be charged more efficiently when they are being charged as a group. They cannot be charged in this manner by classical battery designs because they don’t have the ability to charge an individual cell. The Quantum Advantage is the ratio of how much more efficient collective charging is over parallel charging.
A quantum computer with an advantage for high charge speeds was developed in 2017. There were two possible sources: Global Operation (in which all cells talk at the same time) and All-to-all Coupling, which means every cell can talk to every other but has only 2 participants. The charging speed is unclear whether it has limits and if both of these sources are necessary.
Scientists at IBS recently published a paper that showed that in quantum batteries, it does not matter how many different couples are coupled. The group was able to pinpoint the source of this advantage to global operations and showed that there is only one way to design these batteries.
The group was able to quantitatively measure charging speed in quantum batteries to be faster than other battery types. It increases exponentially with the number of cells and is not limited by classical limitations.
The battery of a typical electric vehicle has about 200 cells. If you were to use quantum charging, the charge time would be cut from 10 hours to about 3 minutes. With high-speed charging stations, the charge time would be cut from 30 minutes to mere seconds.
Researchers say that the implications of quantum charging can be far-reaching and may find key uses in future fusion power plants. Quantum technologies are still in their infancy and there is a long way to go before these methods can be implemented in practice.
Investment in quantum battery technology could lead us to sustainable energy usage.