BM has announced a breakthrough that could lead to quantum computers within 15 years. Researchers presented results of successful experiments at the American Physical Society in Boston that could go a long way to solving some of the critical problems for quantum computing to become a reality, including increasing the lifetime of quantum informational bits.

IBM scientist Matthias Steffen said in statement that “it’s time to start creating systems based on this science.”

A key obstacle for quantum computing has been that qubits — a quantum bit that can simultaneously be a digital one and a zero — have extremely short lifespans when researchers use supercomputing circuits, which is their preferred construction. Previously, qubits’ information disintegrated within a few billionths of a second, which is too short for computing. But the IBM researchers, building on a technique pioneered at Yale, have developed what they described as 3D qubits that last up to 100 microseconds. Researchers said this lifespan is just past the minimum threshold where error correction can capture and correct the information, making computation possible.