What would you say if your notebook battery would take seconds to recharge instead of several hours? It would be wonderful, isn’t it? Or instead to wait a couple of hours to recharge your cell phone, you would wait only a couple of minutes? Pretty amazing, no?

And the best news is that the MIT engineers believe that it will take just two or three years to get our hands on these new type of Lithium-Ion batteries.

According to the MIT news office, the researchers  have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material.

Moreover, their discovery is applicable not only for smaller batteries, like the ones used in laptops and cell phones, but also for recharging the batteries found in the electric cars.

A team led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, made the discovery.

As he explained, until now the scientists have thought that the lithium ions responsible, along with electrons, for carrying charge across the battery simply move too slowly through the material.

But five years ago, he and his colleagues have created a new surface structure that does allow the lithium ions to move quickly around the outside of the material, much like a beltway around a city. Lithium ions could move very

Through this beltway a lithium ion can move very quickly into the material but only through tunnels accessed from the surface. When an ion traveling along this beltway reaches a tunnel, it is instantly diverted into it.

Ceder and his colleagues have already created a small battery that could be fully charged or discharged in 10 to 20 seconds, instead of six minutes required to fully charge or discharge a cell made from the unprocessed material.

"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 concluded.