TABLE OF CONTENTS Nanomaterials and nanostructures have attracted steadily growing interest due to their fascinating properties. Recently, some novel properties that are associated with nanometer-sized dimensions have been found.1 The best-established examples include size-dependent excitation,2 quantized or ballistic conductance,3 Coulomb blockade or single electron tunneling,4 metal-insulator transition,5 , 6 photoluminescence and lasing properties,7 photochemical sensing,8 piezoelectric properties,9 dielectric properties10 etc.
In this chapter, we mainly present the polarization characteristics of metal nanowire microarrays embedded in anodic alumina membrane templates, electronic and magnetic properties of Bi-based nanowire arrays, and thermal expansion properties of nanowire arrays.
Polarization plays a key role in optical devices such as isolators, modulators, and switches. With the development of optical techniques, the miniaturization and highly efficient performance of the devices could be explored in much depth. In these cases, microarray polarizing elements have received growing attention owing to their potential applications in optical communications, optical integrated circuits, and orientation detections.
In contrast to the conventional wire grids fabricated by evaporation11 , 12 and lithography 13 16 methods, metallic nanowire arrays can be synthe-sized through a facile template-based synthesis approach 17 20 rather than complicated and expensive techniques. As early as in 1987, Miyagi et al. predicted the possibility of fabricating a kind of polarizer using the technique of anodic oxidation of aluminium and sealing process.21 Subsequently, Satio and co-workers fabricated a novel wire-grid polarizer made of anodic alumina film filled with metallic...
