IBM has announced that is has made a major breakthrough in its quest to develop quantum computers – now such systems could be as soon as a decade away.

Researchers at IBM's Watson facility in New York claim to have created a mechanism to create the bedrock of quantum computers – building blocks that will be stable enough to use in real-world applications. Quantum computers operate with a basic information-carrying unit called a qubit. IBM computer scientists can now create qubits that hold their quantum state for up to 100 microseconds –four times longer than some previous efforts.

Matthias Steffen, the leader of IBM's quantum computing team said:

"The quantum computing work we are doing shows it is no longer just a brute force physics experiment. It's time to start creating systems based on this science that will take computing to a new frontier," he said.