Microsoft says it has created a long-theorised “Goldilocks” particle that could allow it to make a large-scale quantum computer within the next few years, potentially leapfrogging competitors such as Australian government-funded PsiQuantum in the race to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer.

The breakthrough, which the American tech giant had been working on with the University of Sydney until last year, involved “coaxing into existence” a new subatomic particle known as a “Majorana fermion”, and harnessing it as a quantum bit, or qubit, which is the basic building block of quantum computers.