Delayed flight? Check out O’Hare’s new quantum computer.

Labs, universities, and companies are racing to develop quantum technology solutions for diverse applications, from finance, manufacturing, and medicine. But many members of the public aren’t sure what a quantum computer is, exactly, or even what it looks like.

Nancy Kawalek, the founding director of the University of Chicago’s Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration (STAGE) Center, is utilizing a 2024 APS Innovation Fund grant to bring some quantum bling to O’Hare International Airport.

In a collaboration between the STAGE Center, IBM, and United Airlines, Kawalek and her team installed an IBM System One dilution refrigerator model — the chandelier-like structure that houses and cools a quantum computer — in the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare International Airport.

The exhibit, titled “Imagining the Future: An Encounter with Quantum Technology,” will call the terminal home for at least a year. Displaying the refrigerator is a simple, straightforward way to expose O’Hare’s visitors to quantum computing. It’s an engagement method very much in the STAGE Center’s wheelhouse, says Kawalek, given her team’s charter to generate “emotional engagement, storytelling, and entertainment as a way to get people interested in and excited about science.”

“With so much mistrust of science and false information floating around, I think it’s important for people to understand the truth and the facts,” she says. The installation is accessible by “people from every walk of life,” she adds, so it’s a good opportunity for “a lot of eyeballs in one year to get a glimpse into quantum technology.”

One of the six Innovation Fund projects APS supported for the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, the exhibit enables a broad cross-section of humanity, passing through one of the world’s crossroads, to come face-to-metallic-face with the future.

Among the fast-food kiosks and shops of the airport, the device’s elegant, almost ethereal structure stands out. And there’s a bit of playful juxtaposition in the installation’s placement, too. The futuristic device shares a corridor with an emissary of the past: the nearby “Ernestine,” a fiberglass replica of a brachiosaurus skeleton, formerly housed in Chicago’s Field Museum.

The quantum technology exhibit uses QR codes to direct visitors to online interpretive materials that explain the basics of quantum physics and affirm the refrigerator’s crucial role in the study of quantum properties, all in a digestible format that can keep travelers engaged during a layover.

“I hope they will come away with a sense of wonder,” Kawalek says. “That they won’t look at science and technology as something fearful and distant from their lives.”

“And,” she adds, “I hope that people who might not have any role models or might think they’re not smart enough to be a scientist will realize that science truly is for everyone.”