How would you like to have you phone battery recharge in just seconds, rather than hours? MIT specialists say that is possible, through a new kind of beltway that allows the rapid transit of electric energy through a battery material. The findings appear in this week’s issue of Nature.

State of the art lithium rechargeable batteries have high densities and are ideal for storing large amounts of charge, but they have relatively slow power rates, which means they charge and discharge that energy really slow, the authors of the study said.

At some point, scientists were convinced that the lithium ions were responsible, along with the electrons, for carrying the charge across the battery were moving too slow. But further studies by Gerbrand Ceder, Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, also lead author of this study, revealed that these ions could actually be moving quite fast.

However, they also found that lithium ions can only move quickly into the material through tunnels accessed from the surface. This further drove scientists to create a material especially designed to allow the ions to move quickly around the outside of the material, and at the same time have immediate access to a tunnel entrance.

“The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds rather than hours may open up new technological applications and induce lifestyle changes,” Ceder and Byoungwoo Kang, who co-authored the study, concluded.

The battery they created can be fully charged or discharge in a matter of 10 to 20 seconds, and the material the battery is made of doesn’t degrade as fast as that of normal batteries when charged and re-charged.