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At the exceedingly tiny level where quantum mechanics operates, particles of matter can exist in multiple states—such as "on" and "off" to reference the binary process by which digital computing operates—at the same time. We may not be able to comprehend what this means outside of mathematics, but scientists have theorized for several decades that harnessing these properties for computing would be a natural way past the issues that loom for today's nanoscale silicon-based transistors, which are running up against atomic-level barriers to functionality the smaller they get.
"The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations," the IBM researchers said. "For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.
"These properties will have wide-spread implications foremost for the field of data encryption and other possible applications such as searching databases of unstructured information, performing a range of optimization tasks and solving previously unsolvable mathematical problems," the team added, further elaborating on the possibilities of quantum computing in the video below.
IBM's superconducting qubit device suspends a roughly one-millimeter qubit in the center of a cavity on a small Sapphire chip (pictured below). The cavity "is formed by closing the two halves, and measurements are done by passing microwave signals to the connectors," the team said. The "3D" device looks rather big relative to the tiny conventional computer chips currently in use, but the team said that future scaling should make it possible to operate hundreds or even thousands of qubits in just such a device.