For the first time, our team at the Institute for Experimentalphysik at Innsbruck University in collaboration with Daniel James from Los Alamos Laboratory in the USA succeeded at teleporting the quantum state of a trapped calcium ion to another calcium ion. This is the first time teleportation has been achieved with atomic particles, as opposed to beams of light, in an entirely deliberate, controllable manner.

Arbitrary atomic Bell states with two trapped ions are generated in a deterministic and preprogrammed way. The resulting entanglement is quantitatively analyzed using various measures of entanglement. For this, we reconstruct the density matrix using single qubit rotations and subsequent measurements with near-unity detection efficiency. This procedure represents the basic building block for future process tomography of quantum computations.

We report the deterministic creation of maximally entangled three-qubit states—specifically the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and the W state—with a trapped-ion quantum computer.