The device was created using standard manufacturing techniques, by modifying current-generation silicon transistors, and the technology could scale up to include thousands, even millions of entangled quantum bits on a single chip. Gizmag spoke to the lead researchers to find out more.

What are quantum computers for?

Quantum computers are a peculiar beast. Though the machines we've been building since the 50s have been aiming to be as deterministic and reliable as possible – so a certain input will always result in the same output – in a quantum computer, this dynamic is turned on its head, and predictability is sacrificed for (sometimes) incredible speedups.

A quantum bit, or qubit, has two awesome and confusing properties. First, it can set itself to both 0 and 1 at the same time. And second, it can commune (or entangle) with other qubits to compound this ability. This means five entangled qubits can store and process as much information as 32 (two to the power of five) classical bits; 10 qubits can do as much as 1,000 classical bits; and 300 fully entangled qubits can manipulate as many classical bits of information as there are atoms in the Universe.