Laser-charged quantum battery could store years of energy from a minute’s charge

A team led by the University of Melbourne and CSIRO built a miniature quantum battery that stores energy via quantum coherence in a microcavity (Dicke model); by firing a laser pulse with a 31‑nm bandwidth for a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) they trigger a giant absorption event that charges the battery ultrafast, enabling it to hold a charge for about a million times longer than the charge time—roughly years after a one‑minute charge. Scaling up could allow remote laser charging for drones or quantum computers, though decoherence remains a key challenge.