An Australian-led research team yesterday said they had made a technological breakthrough in the race for a quantum supercomputer that could revolutionise data encryption and medicine.

Engineers from Sydney’s University of New South Wales said they had created the first working quantum bit or qubit – the fundamental unit of a quantum supercomputer – with the findings published in the latest edition of Nature.

Lead researcher Andrew Dzurak said the team used a microwave field to gain unprecedented control over an electron bound to a single phosphorous atom that was implanted in a silicon transistor device.

They were able to both write and read information using the electron’s spin, or magnetic orientation, which Dzurak said was a “key advance towards realising a silicon quantum computer based on single atoms”.

Quantum computing harnesses the power of atoms and molecules to perform calculations and store data, with the potential to be millions of times more powerful than the most advanced modern computers.

Dzurak’s research partner Andrea Morello said quantum computers, which could run one million parallel computations at once compared with a desktop PC’s single-computation capacity, could do things that were currently impossible.

Morello said the study was significant because it was the first time silicon had been used – a well understood and easily accessed material.