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Wire-grid polarizer sheets in the terahertz region have been fabricated on flexible substrates by nanoimprint technology. They show ideal polarization property in the terahertz frequency region whereas the cost is very low. Since the wire pitch is far smaller than the wavelength, the effective medium theory agrees well with experimental results. The effective medium theory shows possibility of further improvement of polarization properties by selecting appropriate materials for wire grids.

We show that silver nanoparticles, which are deposited on a terahertz-receiving antenna, can be sintered by intense terahertz pulse irradiation. The conductance of the silver nanoparticles between the antenna electrodes is measured under the terahertz pulse irradiation. The dispersant materials surrounding the nanoparticles are peeled off, and conduction paths are created. We reveal that, during sintering, quantum point contacts are formed, leading to quantized conductance between the electrodes with the conductance quantum, which reflects the formation of atomically thin wires. The terahertz electric pulses are sufficiently intense to activate electromigration, i.e., transfer of kinetic energy from the electrons to the silver atoms. The silver atoms move and atomically thin wires form under the intense terahertz pulse irradiation. These findings may inspire nanoscale structural processing by terahertz pulse irradiation

The design of a self-complementary metallic checkerboard pattern achieves broadband, dispersion-less, and maximized absorption, concentrating in the deep subwavelength resistive connections between squares, without any theoretical limitation on the energy absorbing area. Here, we experimentally and numerically investigate the electromagnetic response in the limit of extremely small connections. We show that finite conductivity and randomness in a near-self-complementary checkerboard pattern plays a crucial role in producing a frequency-independent energy loss in the terahertz frequency region. Here metals behave like an almost perfect conductor. When the checkerboard pattern approaches the perfect self-complementary pattern, the perfect conductor approximation spontaneously breaks down, owing to the finite conductivity at the nano- scale connection, leading to broadband absorption. It is also shown that the random connections between metallic squares also lead to broadband and maximized energy loss through scattering loss, similar to finite conductivity.