An Indian-origin scientist -led team in the US has packaged lithium ion batteries into a single nanowire, which they claim could soon be a rechargeable power source for new generations of nanoelectronics.

Prof Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues at Rice University claim their creation is as small as such devices can possibly get, in their research published in American Chemical Society journal 'Nano Letters'.

In their research, the scientists tested two versions of their battery. The first is a sandwich with nickel or tin anode, polyethylene oxide electrolyte and polyaniline cathode layers; it was built as proof that lithium ions would move efficiently through anode to electrolyte and then to supercapacitor-like cathode that gives the device ability to charge and discharge.

The second packs the same capabilities into a single nanowire. The researchers built centimetre-scale arrays containing thousands of nanowire devices, each 150 nanometers wide. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, thousands of times smaller than a human hair. .