Reconfigurable nanowire assembly enabled field-switchable broadband polarizers

In this paper, a switchable broadband polarizer based on the electric field directed reconfigurable assembly of gold nanowires (NWs) is presented. Taking advantage of the collective optical properties of the two-dimensional gold NW lattices, we have experimentally demonstrated that transmission of linear polarized light can be purposely controlled using a dual electrode design to reversibly rotate the lattice by 90° on-demand. In addition, our experiments reveal that the transmission control is closely related to the geometrical dimensions of the NWs as well as the applied electric field conditions.