Carbon Nanotube Terahertz Polarizer

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly aligned single-walled carbon nanotube film that functions as an efficient terahertz linear polarizer with nearly perfect anisotropic response and minimal attenuation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nanotube film with exceptional alignment and polarization properties for terahertz applications.

Findings

Virtually no attenuation for perpendicular polarization

Reduced linear dichroism of 3 indicating near-perfect alignment

Intrinsic anisotropic terahertz response of the nanotube film

Abstract

We describe a film of highly-aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes that acts as an excellent terahertz linear polarizer. There is virtually no attenuation (strong absorption) when the terahertz polarization is perpendicular (parallel) to the nanotube axis. From the data we calculated the reduced linear dichrosim to be 3, corresponding to a nematic order parameter of 1, which demonstrates nearly perfect alignment as well as intrinsically anisotropic terahertz response of single-walled carbon nanotubes in the film.