Design007 Magazine

Design007-Oct2018

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OCTOBER 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 29 that they can take time off to go on vaca- tions together. Taylor: We're doing that here as well in the front end so that we have the flex- ibility to rotate based on the demands of our schedule. We don't want to be stuck where we only have two product engineers and four CAMmers, so there's cross-training going on, and everybody here will be capable of performing every task in tooling. Shaughnessy: You're writing the textbook as you go. Taylor: We'll see. I'd like to read that book another year. Shaughnessy: It sounds like an exciting place to work. We were laughing about how usually when we visit a board shop, everybody has a hang-dog look. Everyone at GreenSource was happy to be there. Taylor: I cannot say enough good things about Whelen and GreenSource. They're the best employer I've ever had. They treat us very well. It's challenging, and it can be frustrating, but finding solu- tions to the challenges is what keeps me motivated. If you came in every day and did the same thing, it would get very boring. We do not have boring days here. Shaughnessy: I know you all will be busy when you open the doors in a few months, so it's an exciting time for you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Taylor: Thank you for sharing our story. Schilloff: You are welcome at GreenSource any time. DESIGN007 Novel Topological Insulator Topological insulators are materials with very spe- cial properties. They conduct electricity or light par- ticles on their surface or edges only but not on the inside. This unusual behaviour could eventually lead to technical innovations, which is why topological insula- tors have been the subject of intense global research for several years. Physicists of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würz- burg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany now report their dis- covery in the journal "Nature." For the first time, the team has successfully built a topological insulator operating with both light and electronic excitations simultaneously, called an "exciton-polariton topologi - cal insulator." Dr. Sebastian Klembt, group leader at Höfling's chair, said that the topological insulator was built on a micro- chip and basically consists of the gallium arsenide semiconductor compound. It has a honeycomb struc- ture and is made up of many small pillars, each two micrometres (two millionths of a metre) in diameter. Propagation Direction Can be Controlled When exciting this microstructure with laser light, light-matter particles form inside it, exclusively at the edges. The particles then travel along the edges and around the corners with relatively low loss. It is a sophisticated systems which works in appli - cation-oriented dimensions, on a microchip, and in which light can be controlled. Usually, this is not so easy to accomplish: Pure light particles have no elec- tric charge and therefore cannot be readily controlled with electric or magnetic fields. The new topological insulator, in contrast, is capable of doing this by "send- ing light around the corner," in a manner of speaking. (Source: University of Wurzburg)

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