The world's most powerful quantum computer processor could be created by Google, if research underway at the firm pays off. The company is currently testing a quantum processor more than twice as powerful as its previously announced chip, and claims it will be ready by the end of 2017.
If successful, the processor could lead to computers capable of solving scientific mysteries that would take ordinary computers billions of years to compute.
Google's quantum AI lab is testing a 20-qubit processor that has a two-qubit fidelity of 99.5 per cent, a measure of how many errors the chip makes.
And the company claims it will have a working 49-qubit chip by the end of the year.
The technology firm previously only publicly confirmed it has achieved a nine-qubit machine, built in 2015.
To beat conventional machines, in what scientists call 'quantum supremacy', the new chip will need to have a two-qubit fidelity of at least 99.7 per cent.
This margin of error has to be corrected before functioning quantum computers can be built.
Alan Ho, an engineer in Google's quantum AI lab, revealed the company's progress at a quantum computing conference in Munich, according to reports in New Scientist.
He says it will likely be 2027 before error-corrected quantum computers are likely to arrive.
But the first step of showing that quantum supremacy can be achieved would be a major coup for Google.
Speaking to New Scientist, Simon Devitt at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan said: 'Things really have moved much quicker than I would have expected.'
The heart of modern computing is binary code, which has served computers for decades.
Machines use bits which can be either a 1 or a 0 to process data, but quantum computers are instead based on quantum bits or 'qubits', which can be 1, 0 or even both at the same time.
These qubits rely on the strange quantum property of superposition, in which subatomic particles can exist in a haze of no fixed state.
Despite the great promise, one of the major stumbling blocks for the development of quantum computers has been demonstrating they can beat classical computers.
Google engineers reported their plans to hit the 42 qubit benchmark, in a paper published on Arxiv.org in January.
Moving much beyond this barrier becomes unworkable for classical computers due to the enormous amounts of memory required.
But if the team can push this to a working machine using a grid of just 49 qubits, it will have created a machine able to beat the best computers which exist today and achieved quantum supremacy.
Firm's such as Google hope that quantum computing could be the solution for analysing huge datasets to find optimum solutions.
