Quantum computers are made to solve mathematical problems and compute much faster than classical computers can. 

Willow [the new Google quantum chip] is a quantum computer chip, essentially the same thing as a classical computer chip, but one which works much faster than any classical computer and any other quantum chip made. 

“A calculation that takes Willow under five minutes would take the fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years, which is a 1 with 24 zeros following it, which is longer than the age of our universe,” Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI, said.

Scientists use unique qualities of quantum mechanics to solve problems that even the most powerful classical computer couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to solve. Quantum mechanics is the study of subatomic particles. 

Quantum computers could help with everything from business to medical research on existing drugs and exploratory therapies for diseases. 

Computers work  by using bits. According to Robert Sheldon from TechTarget, a bit is the smallest unit of data that a computer can process and store. Classical computers use bits by using zeroes and ones to store and process data while quantum computers use quantum bits or for short “qubits” in superposition to encode even more data at once. 

“Superposition is the state in which a quantum particle or system can represent not just one possibility, but a combination of multiple possibilities.” Schneider and Smalley said. Qubits can act like regular bits and store zeros and ones, but it could also be a weighted combination of zeroes and ones. 

According to TechTarget, when qubits in superposition are combined, they will scale exponentially, meaning two qubits can compute with four pieces of information, three can compute with eight, and four can compute with sixteen. Some qubits are outliers, but you can fix them by re-configuring them to perform inline with the rest of the device.