Researchers delving deeply into their fields routinely risk overlooking a vital connection staring them in the face. If you're a scientist dealing at the scale of billionths of metres, that danger is perhaps greater than usual.

So it was in May 2015, that a trio of researchers at the University of NSW stumbled across the idea of making more room on a silicon atom to squeeze in quantum computer bits – known as qubits – by pulling electrons away from the nucleus.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday, the scientists including Guilherme Tosi​ unveil the theoretical potential of this novel approach. They predict it will remove a hurdle that threatened to stall progress on scaling up the number of qubits on silicon chips needed to make quantum computing viable.

Unlike the discrete zeros and ones now used in so-called "classical" computing, qubits can be either a one, a zero or both at the same time, opening the way for an exponential increase in computing speeds using these "superpositions". Many problems now limited by computing power, from medicine to climate modelling, would be more easily solved with quantum computing.