Conducting nanowires possess remarkable physical properties unattainable in bulk materials. However our understanding of their transport properties is limited by the difficulty of connecting them electrically. In this letter we investigate phototransport in both bulk silicon and silicon nanowires using a superconducting multimode resonator operating at frequencies between 0.3 and 3 GHz. We find that whereas the bulk Si response is mainly dissipative, the nanowires exhibit a large dielectric polarizability. This technique is contactless and can be applied to other semiconducting nanowires and molecules.
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