The optical conductivity of graphene nanoribbons is analytical and exactly
derived. It is shown that the absence of translation invariance along the
transverse direction allows considerable intra-band absorption in a narrow
frequency window that varies with the ribbon width, and lies in the THz range
domain for ribbons 10-100nm wide. In this spectral region the absorption
anisotropy can be as high as two orders of magnitude, which renders the medium
strongly dichroic, and allows for a very high degree of polarization (up to
~85) with just a single layer of graphene. The effect is resilient to level
broadening of the ribbon spectrum potentially induced by disorder. Using a
cavity for impedance enhancement, or a stack of few layer nanoribbons, these
values can reach almost 100%. This opens a potential prospect of employing
graphene ribbon structures as efficient polarizers in the far IR and THz
frequencies.Comment: Revised version. 10 pages, 7 figure
