  Quantum mechanics provides spectacular new information processing abilities
(Bennett 1995, Preskill 1998). One of the most unexpected is a procedure called
quantum teleportation (Bennett et al 1993) that allows the quantum state of a
system to be transported from one location to another, without moving through
the intervening space. Partial implementations of teleportation (Bouwmeester et
al 1997, Boschi et al 1998) over macroscopic distances have been achieved using
optical systems, but omit the final stage of the teleportation procedure. Here
we report an experimental implementation of the full quantum teleportation
operation over inter-atomic distances using liquid state nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR). The inclusion of the final stage enables for the first time a
teleportation implementation which may be used as a subroutine in larger
quantum computations, or for quantum communication. Our experiment also
demonstrates the use of quantum process tomography, a procedure to completely
characterize the dynamics of a quantum system. Finally, we demonstrate a
controlled exploitation of decoherence as a tool to assist in the performance
of an experiment.
