The landmark discovery, published in Nature today, was nine years in the making.
"This is the most exciting discovery of my career," senior author and quantum physicist Michelle Simmons, founder of Silicon Quantum Computing and director of the Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at UNSW told ScienceAlert.
Not only did Simmons and her team create what's essentially a functional quantum processor, they also successfully tested it by modeling a small molecule in which each atom has multiple quantum states – something a traditional computer would struggle to achieve.
This suggests we're now a step closer to finally using quantum processing power to understand more about the world around us, even at the tiniest scale.
"In the 1950s, Richard Feynman said we're never going to understand how the world works – how nature works – unless we can actually start to make it at the same scale," Simmons told ScienceAlert.
"If we can start to understand materials at that level, we can design things that have never been made before.