Xavier Vlad, who heads up the Center for Advanced Material Irradiation, describes an experimental oddity: one test sample vanished from the vacuum chamber at the end of an ion beam line and appeared in a separate chamber in a different area of the lab. Dare we call it teleportation?

Xavier Vlad is a professor of Material Irradiation at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. His research group, the Composition Analysis Lab (CAL), uses ion beams to probe the structure and composition of materials.