Google has unveiled a new chip that claims to take five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest supercomputers ten billion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to solve.

The chip is the latest development in the field of quantum computing, which attempts to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of incredibly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, called Willow, contains important “breakthroughs” and “paves the path to a useful large-scale quantum computer.”

However, experts say Willow is a largely experimental device for now, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a variety of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work fundamentally differently than the computer in your phone or laptop.

They use quantum mechanics – the strange behavior of ultra-small particles – to solve problems much faster than traditional computers.

There is hope that quantum computers will eventually be able to use this ability to significantly speed up complex processes, such as the development of new drugs.

There are also fears that it could be used for malicious purposes, such as cracking some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

Apple in February announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats will be made “quantum safe” to prevent them from being read by powerful quantum computers of the future.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab, from which Willow emerged, and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined to provide further details for now.

However, a chip suitable for commercial applications will not come to market until the end of the decade, he said.

These applications would initially be the simulation of systems in which quantum effects are important

“For example, it would be relevant when it comes to designing nuclear fusion reactors, understanding how drugs work and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant to developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks.”

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow’s achievement meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but will not replace them.

He cautions against overstating the significance of Willow’s performance in a single test.

“You have to be careful not to compare apples with oranges,” he told the BBC.

Google had chosen as its performance benchmark a problem that was “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and that did not show “general speedup compared to classical computers.”

Still, he said Willow is a significant step forward, particularly in so-called error correction.

Simply put: the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However, a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has so far increased the more qubits a chip has.

However, Google researchers say they reversed this and managed to design and program the new chip in such a way that the error rate across the system decreased as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that addressed a key challenge that had dogged the field “for almost 30 years,” Mr. Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to “if you had a plane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines are even safer.”

Errors pose a significant obstacle to developing more powerful quantum computers and the development is “encouraging for anyone who wants to build a practical quantum computer,” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that in order to develop practically usable quantum computers, the error rate still needs to be much lower than that given by Willow.

Willow was manufactured at Google’s new purpose-built manufacturing facility in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The United Kingdom recently launched the National Quantum Computing Center (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language fueling the “hype cycle” and considered Willow a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive work”.

Ultimately, quantum computers would help with a range of tasks, including “logistics problems like distributing cargo on planes or routing telecommunications signals or stored energy across the national grid,” he said.

And in the UK there were already 50 quantum companies that received £800 million in funding and employed 1,300 people.

Researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan presented on Friday published an essay This shows the very low error rate in a qubit with trapped ions.

They’re taking a different approach to making a quantum computer that can operate at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip needs to be stored at extremely low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific lessons have been learned from Google’s development of Willow published in the magazine Nature