Quantum scientists at IBM Research have announced major advances in quantum computing that could place real, practical quantum computers in businesses and homes within the next 10 years.

The main breakthrough revolves around the long-term integrity of qubits. To perform quantum computing, you need to be able to reliably store and interrogate qubits — but qubits are incredibly flighty creatures that readily change their state through decoherence. IBM has created a high-coherence 3D qubit that retains its state for up to 100 microseconds, or 0.1 milliseconds. This is stable enough that engineers can now shift their focus to scaling up the number of qubits to create a quantum logic computer.

In a separate experiment, IBM created a 3-qubit chip (die pictured right; complete chip above) using conventional semiconductor fabrication techniques, which was then used to perform a controlled-NOT logic operation with a 95% success rate. This kind of success rate is unheard of in quantum computers, and again comes down to the fact that IBM has managed to create qubits with relatively high stability (10 microseconds in this case). IBM is confident that this experiment paves the way to multi-qubit logic chips.

All in all, IBM Research is now saying that bona fide quantum computers are now just 10 to 15 years away. Why is this significant? Well, put it this way: According to IBM, 250 qubits would be able to store “more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.” This in itself is truly awesome — but then when you factor in that a quantum computer could perform logic on all of that data, in parallel, instantaneously… well, you begin to see the power of quantum computing. You’re talking about the performance of a supercomputer on a single chip.

But therein lies the crux: We’re still not entirely sure what we would use quantum computers for. It is generally believed that quantum computers would be the most beastly factorization machines ever conceived. Factoring is the basis for modern cryptography. Quantum computers would not only excel at secure communications, then, but they would also be able to break any non-quantum-encrypted data in seconds.

Beyond that, quantum computers might be good at investigating databases of unstructured data (similar to the quantum PageRank that we wrote about last year), and attempting unsolved mathematical problems.

For an excellent introduction to quantum computing and the significance of IBM’s breakthroughs, watch the video below — or read more about the breakthroughs at IBM.