Another major quantum computing record has been broken, and by a considerable margin: physicists have now built an array containing 6,100 qubits, the largest of its type and way above the thousand or so qubits previous systems contained.

It's the work of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, who used cesium atoms as their qubits, trapping them in place with a complex system of lasers that acted as tweezers to keep the atoms as stable as possible.

Qubits differ from the classical bits of traditional computers by exploiting what's known as a superposition: not just binary states of 1 or 0, but a spread of probabilities t hat allows for algorithms that can solve problems considered out of reach of conventional computing methods.

A lot of qubits will be needed to

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