Asher Peres, one of the coinventors of teleportation, had an amusing story (with a serious subtext) about the question of what is teleported: "Later, when a new

Asher Peres, one of the coinventors of teleportation, had an amusing story (with a serious subtext) about the question of what is teleported: "Later, when a newsman asked me whether it was possible to teleport not only the body but also the soul, I answered “only the soul.” Even that is a gross oversimplification." http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0304158.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0304158.pdf In teleportation experiments to date only some degrees of freedom are teleported. So it doesn't usually make a whole lot of sense to say "the atom" was teleported. Rather, it'll just be the quantum state associated to nuclear spin states, or electronic degrees of freedom, or whatever.