Art created by Fernando Flor, NSF MPS-Ascend postdoctoral fellow in physics and a member of Yale’s Wright Lab, is on exhibit at the Yale Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library through January 15, 2024.
According to the library’s website, “the ‘Data as Art’ exhibition invites visitors to explore the aesthetic potential of scientific data. This unique display challenges the conventional perception of data as purely objective, highlighting its capacity to inspire artistic expression and creativity. “
“The works featured in this exhibition are contributed by students, researchers, clinicians, and staff across the Yale campus who view data as a canvas for artistic exploration.”
According to Flor, his work “Copy of a…” shows the relative yields of final state hadrons emerging out of central Pb-Pb Collisions recorded by the ALICE detector at center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV.”
Flor explained further, “Each circle represents pions, kaons, protons, ph-mesons and Lambda, Xi and Omega baryons; sized according to their masses relative to each other, with the colors distinguishing the particles. Each circle is adjacent to their parent particle in order to reflect their respective decay relationships. The white rectangular space represents a canonical volume for quantum number conservation—in this case, baryon number, electric charge and strangeness—within a grand canonical volume. This work was inpired by the Hagedorn Bootstrap as well as the Statistical Hadronization Model.”
More information about the exhibit can be found at the link below. A higher resolution version of the piece can be found here (PDF).