The effects of nanoparticle shape and orientation on the low frequency dielectric properties of nanocomposites

In this paper, we examine the effects of aspect ratio and orientational order of nanoparticles on the dielectric properties of nanocomposites. The motivation is to clearly establish the effects of orientational order, since ambiguities exist in the literature. We focus on metallic nanoparticles, and show that, in the dilute concentration limit, theory, experiments and numerical simulations all unequivocally indicate that the effective dielectric constant increases with increasing aspect ratio and increasing degree of alignment of rod-like nanoparticles when they orient in direction of the electric field.