It enables researchers to perform complex computational tasks in the cloud and the public to experience quantum computing at the speed of microseconds.
That ant was the animal acceleration record-holder until 2018, when it was dethroned by the snap-jaw, or dracula ant, which snaps its jaws in 23 microseconds.
The software involved is able to track the plasma's behaviour so rapidly that it can tweak conditions every 100 microseconds, keeping it away from the reactor walls.
If you think about that in terms of the thickness of an earbud, it's getting from the outside of the earbud to the inside of the earbud in about 15 microseconds, so that's millionths of a second.
" When it comes to timing precision, " Nina wrote in her book, " [the auditory system leaves] the visual system in the dust." We can hear differences in timing as small as one hundredth of a second, or 10 microseconds.