Key numbers: They doubled Wh/kg from about 280 to about 500.
I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right?
Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy.
How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here?
Update:
Did a bit of googling (Note to my future self: AI was still bad at math in 2023): Looks like 1kg of mass cointains about 25x10^9 Wh.
So if the above assumptions are right, we still have 8 orders of magnitude to go. An electric car with an optimal battery could go 100,000,000 times further on a single charge than the current ones.
Ridiculously higher. One gram of matter converted to energy (matter-antimatter annihilation assumed to be 100% efficient) yields, using E = mc^2 and 3.6x10^6 Joules per Kilowatt-hour, 25 million Kilowatt-hours
A unit containing matter and antimatter isn’t a battery, it’s a completely different thing altogether.
Maybe a slightly closer but still very different example would be a core of weapons grade plutonium. But what you’ve described would be far more powerful than that.
I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right?
Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy.
How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here?
Update:
Did a bit of googling (Note to my future self: AI was still bad at math in 2023): Looks like 1kg of mass cointains about 25x10^9 Wh.
So if the above assumptions are right, we still have 8 orders of magnitude to go. An electric car with an optimal battery could go 100,000,000 times further on a single charge than the current ones.