_______Battery that charges in seconds_______

London: The days of waiting hours to charge a mobile phone could soon be history, thanks to US researchers, who have created a revolutionary battery that recharges in seconds instead of taking several hours.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller and lighter batteries,.The work was led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P Simmons professor of Materials Science and Engineering. Since the material involved is not new -- the researchers have simply changed the way they make it.

State-of-the-art lithium rechargeable batteries have very high energy densities - they are good at storing large amounts of charge. The tradeoff is that they have relatively slow power rates - they are sluggish at gaining and discharging that energy.

Conventionally, boffins have thought that the lithium ions responsible, along with electrons, for carrying charge across the battery simply move too slowly through
the material.

However, about five years ago, Ceder and colleagues made a surprising discovery. Computer calculations of a well-known battery material, lithium iron phosphate, predicted that the material's lithium ions should actually be moving extremely quickly. Further calculations showed that lithium ions can indeed move very quickly.