I heard that a group of scientists managed to teleport a single atom once. After delving further into the topic, it

Question: I heard that a group of scientists managed to teleport a single atom once. After delving further into the topic, it came to light that the scientists simply teleported the "characteristics" of the atom. What does this mean?

Asked by face to Hywel, Joseph, Patience, Poonam, Rachael on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
- Joseph Cook answered on 18 Jun 2010:
  
  This is an extremely complicated question. It has to do with quantum mechanics.
  
  The “characteristics” of an atom in this case is the energy state that it’s in. Because we’re dealing with atoms which are very small, quantum mechanics applies and there are only certain energy states that the atom can be in. The energy states it can take depend on things like the way that the electrons are arranged or the way that it is spinning, characteristics that are individually simple but combine to give a more complicated state.
- Dr Hywel Jones answered on 18 Jun 2010:
  
  I’m not that familiar with this type of work but what I guess they mean is they managed to transfer the properties of a particle, its spin probably and made another similar particle take up the properties of the first particle, but without any direct connection between them.
- Poonam Kaushik answered on 19 Jun 2010:
  
  Hi dear this is one of the brilliant question!this news was published on 23 January 2009 11:35 am ET that Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the “Star Trek” feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.
  
  This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.
  
  Teleportation is one of nature’s most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons (a unit, or quantum, of electromagnetic radiation, such as light) over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third.
  
  None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

Comments

face commented on 21 Jun 2010:

Thanks, to some you have helped me understand the theory better. Thank you for your time.

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Question: I heard that a group of scientists managed to teleport a single atom once. After delving further into the topic, it came to light that the scientists simply teleported the "characteristics" of the atom. What does this mean?