In 1982 Blatt received a research grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to go to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), Boulder, and work with John L. Hall (Nobel Prize winner 2005) for a year.

In 1983 he went on to the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the following year joined the working group of Peter E. Toschek at the University of Hamburg.

After another stay in the US, Rainer Blatt applied to qualify as a professor by receiving the “venia docendi” in experimental physics in 1988.

In the period from 1989 until 1994 he worked as a Heisenberg research fellow at the University of Hamburg and returned several times to JILA in Boulder.

[3] In 2004, using their suggested set-up, Blatt’s working group, at the same time as a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, USA, succeeded for the first time in transferring the quantum information of one atom in a totally controlled manner onto another atom (teleportation).

The science journal Nature reported these independently conducted experiments back-to-back and gave them pride of place on the cover.

Two years later, Rainer Blatt’s working group already managed to entangle up to eight atoms in a controlled manner.

Six of his former assistants (Christoph Becher, Jürgen Eschner, Hartmut Häffner, Dietrich Leibfried, Piet O. Schmidt, Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler) have since been appointed to chairs at universities abroad.