The Spirit of the Future
                                          Igeawagu -Im Fokus der Zeiten

Abb. 1: Verblüffende und faszinierende Farbensymmetrie optischer Nahfeldmikroskopie von metallischen zweidimensionalen chiralen Strukturen.

Scientists and the Swastika.

The geometric arrangement of lines most commonly know as the swastika, has found a new application in photonics. Researchers at Southampton University have produced tens of thousands of gold swastika’s on a square millimetre to form new optical “metamaterials” that can artificially change the polarisation state of light.

The swastika has number of special features, it is entirely made up vertical and horizontal straight lines, it is square and yet it can still provide the feeling of left-handed or right-handed rotation known as chirality.

It is, perhaps these special features that had made the symbol such a powerful icon in many parts of the world long before Hitler chose to use the right-handed version to symbolise sweeping political change. Hinduism…., native Indians…. the Japanese….and in the UK, the fylfot or flyfoot were symbols commonly used….

Dr Bagnall of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University says, “when we started to consider which chiral geometries would be most suitable for our experiments it was impossible for us to ignore the swastika, it squareness equates to an absence of optical birefringence at normal incidence, and the straight horizontal and vertical lines can be readily drawn at a nano length scales using electron beam lithography.”

The team at Southampton have found that the interaction between light and their two dimensional chiral metamaterials, can cause changes in polarization state that were only previously observed as a result of interactions with three dimensional materials.

The group are continuing to experiment with the wide range of chiral geometries, “Triskella (such as the symbol that represents the Isle of man), spirals and some chiral fractals can gain us additional functionality, and while we are still at an early stage in our experiments we can already anticipate applications in optoelectronics, laser physics and optical communications”, says Dr Bagnall. This is especially true, as technologists are increasingly using polarization state as a means of carrying information in applications such as quantum cryptography…..

www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~jkl2/ecs news releases/Swastika.doc