Sparks Electrical News October 2019

LIGHTING

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LIGHTING DESIGN DRIVES HIGH PERFORMING FOURWAYS MALL

A ccelerate Property Fund and its development part- ner’s multi billion Rand investment into transforming Fourways Mall came to fruition as the renovation and expansion project completed its final phase, promising inves- tors solid returns and customers a world-class ‘shoppertain- ment’ and international standard retail experience. “The launch represents the first step in the fund’s 15- year plan for the Fourways node, including enhanced office, hospitality and retail offerings,” says Andrew Costa, COO of Accelerate Property Fund (APF). “The impact of new traffic routes, densification and growth, as well as developing and maximising properties that enhance the value of the area is key to future growth in the node.” The sprawling shopping and entertainment complex boasts a gross lettable area of 178 000m 2, comprising over 450 stores. This will later grow to 200 000m 2 with the launch of French home improvement mega-retailer Leroy Merlin, with its box, to be linked to the main mall, currently under construction. New local and international stores such as Lindt, Hamleys, Cotton On, Nike, Adidas Starbucks, H & M and Exclusive Books complement the extensive food court and entertainment offerings, and existing tenants such as Mr Price, the Foschini Group stores, Edgars and Woolworths have expanded their stores. All new and expanding stores will be first of their kind in South Africa, introducing concept store offerings that will be exclusive to Fourways Mall. The lighting design of the centre plays a large part in the experience with a number of ‘feature areas’ included which use lighting as a defining factor. The new football-sized Market Square at the heart of the mall will be home to launches, events and activations, and shoppers will find it easy to get back to their cars with the mall’s clever colour themes – linked to the lighting – which assist with wayfinding and navigation within the mall. “With the extension and additional retail space supplied, the Fourways node will be the most dominant retail market in South Africa,” Costa says. “It will further contribute to solid tenant retention which is now comfortably above 85%, as well as declining vacancy levels across APF properties, which dropped from 10% in 2018 to 9% in 2019.” NEW PROPERTY OF LIGHT DISCOVERED A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has an- nounced that its has discovered a new prop- erty of light – self-torque. In a paper published in the journal Science , the researchers describe how they happened to spot the new property and possible uses for it. Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum. Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams. They appear as a helix surrounding a common centre, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped. In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before. The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas – doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam. The researchers then wondered what would happen if the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and if they were slightly out of sync. This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with a gradually changing twist. And when the beam struck a flat surface, it looked like a crescent moon. The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon at the front of the beam was orbiting around its centre more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property, self-torque.

Enquiries: www.phys.org

SPARKS ELECTRICAL NEWS

OCTOBER 2019