Beneath the green, the quantum
Site-specific art installation on the New Haven Green that engaged visitors through its forest of interactive light beacons and the deployment of Yale University’s latest quantum error correction research.
A human-scaled light installation, created in collaboration with Yale Quantum Institute researchers and students, that investigates the latest in quantum error correction research—an essential tool in the pursuit of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Visitors are invited to circulate through this interactive forest of vertical illuminated beacons; their bodies acting as proxies for the destructive quantum noise and decoherence that arises within a quantum device as it operates. In response, the illuminated beacons recognize these “quantum errors” and attempt to mitigate them in real-time, illustrated through patterns of light that ripple across the collective. This attempt to resolve observer-induced “error” is driven by actual quantum error correcting algorithms researched and developed at Yale University.
The crowning lights atop each beacon gently allude to the New Haven Green’s spooky history as a temporary respite for souls en route to a rapturous beyond; metaphorically drawing energy from beneath the grassy surface and transmitting it heavenward—like a photon traversing an impossible barrier in the cold, dark, and isolated environment of a quantum device’s dilution refrigeration tank. And just as the “beach hides beneath the paving stones”, perhaps a united future of students and workers can grow from this soil of uncertainty, seeded by the momentum of generative artificial intelligence and new forms of computation that promise to redefine what it is to labor, produce, and consume.