With many thousands of different varieties to date, the nanowire (NW) library continues to grow at pace. With the continued and hastened maturity of nanotechnology, significant advances in materials science have allowed for the rational synthesis of a myriad of NW types of unique electronic and optical properties, allowing for the realization of a wealth of novel devices, whose use is touted to become increasingly central in a number of emerging technologies. Nanowires, structures defined as having diameters between 1 and 100 nm, provide length scales at which a variety of inherent and unique physical effects come to the fore (Hornyak GL, Fundamentals of nanotechnology, Taylor & Francis Group, Boca Raton, 2009), phenomena which are often size-suppressed in their bulk counterparts (Nalwa HS, Handbook of nanostructured materials and nanotechnology. Academic, New York, 2000; Paul Alivisatos PFB, Welford Castleman A, Chang J, Dixon DA, Klein ML, McLendon GL, Miller JS, Ratner MA, Rossky PJ, Stupp SI, Thompson ME, Adv Mater 10(16), 39, 1998; Moskovits VMSM, Nanostructured materials: clusters, composites, and thin films. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 1999). It is these size-dependent effects that have underpinned the growing interest in the growth and fabrication, at ever more commercial scales, of nanoscale structures. Nevertheless, many of the intrinsic properties of such NWs become largely smeared, and often entirely lost, when they adopt disordered ensembles. Conversely, ordered and aligned NWs have been shown to retain many such properties, alongside proffering various new properties that manifest on the micro- and even macroscale that would hitherto not occur in their disordered counterparts.