From Distribution to Audience Engagement: Social Change Through Film

What comes to mind when someone mentions independent film "distribution"? You can probably define that fairly easily – the selling and delivery of these titles to audiences through any number of means: theatrical, DVD sales, festival release, broadcast and perhaps even online streaming.What if someone said "outreach" or "audience engagement"? Can you define and distinguish those terms as easily? We have found that these two terms are often used interchangeably – creating confusion within the social issue independent film community, and in our own conversations. We hope that this paper creates a more standard definition for the terms and infuses a new understanding of the importance of each of these distinct components and how they work together to spark social change. From our perspective, distinguishing these terms is critical because they are key components of the work we do at The Fledgling Fund – supporting creative media that inspires social change

Self-assembled hexagonal double fishnets as negative index materials

We show experimentally the successful use of colloidal lithography for the fabrication of negative index metamaterials in the near-infrared wavelength range. In particular, we investigated a specific implementation of the widely studied double fishnet metamaterials, consisting of a gold-silica-gold layer stack perforated by a hexagonal array of round holes. Tuning of the hole diameter allows us to tailor these self-assembled metamaterials both as single- ({\epsilon} < 0) and double ({\epsilon} < 0 and {\mu} < 0) negative metamaterials

Magnetic dipole induced guided vortex motion

We present evidence of magnetically controlled guided vortex motion in a hybrid superconductor/ferromagnet nanosystem consisting of an Al film on top of a square array of permalloy square rings. When the rings are magnetized with an in-plane external field H, an array of point-like dipoles with moments antiparallel to H, is formed. The resulting magnetic template generates a strongly anisotropic pinning potential landscape for vortices in the superconducting layer. Transport measurements show that this anisotropy is able to confine the flux motion along the high symmetry axes of the square lattice of dipoles. This guided vortex motion can be either re-routed by 90 degrees by simply changing the dipole orientation or even strongly suppressed by inducing a flux-closure magnetic state with very low stray fields in the rings.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure