Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes - study of effective electric permittivity

In this paper we aim to assign effective electric permittivity values to vertically aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes fabricated by the state-of-the-artmanufacturing techniques. The effective constitutive parameters of this artificial medium depend on the density of the carbon nanotubes. The overview of the densities of the grown aligned carbon nanotubes reported in the literature is given in the paper. The effective parameters are modelled by Maxwell-Garnett homogenization formulas. Carbon nanotube forests form artificial lossy dielectrics with the real part of the effective electric permittivity between 1 and 2 in the optical and near-infrared range.