No abstract

Colloidal metal nanowire based transparent conductors are excellent candidates to replace indium-tin-oxide (ITO) owing to their outstanding balance between transparency and conductivity, flexibility, and solution-processability. Copper stands out as a promising material candidate due to its high intrinsic conductivity and earth abundance. Here, we report a new synthetic approach, using tris(trimethylsilyl)silane as a mild reducing reagent, for synthesizing high-quality, ultrathin, and monodispersed copper nanowires, with an average diameter of 17.5 nm and a mean length of 17 μm. A study of the growth mechanism using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy reveals that the copper nanowires adopt a five-fold twinned structure and evolve from decahedral nanoseeds. Fabricated transparent conducting films exhibit excellent transparency and conductivity. An additional advantage of our nanowire transparent conductors is highlighted through reduced optical haze factors (forward light scattering) due to the small nanowire diameter.

Recently, solid-state lighting has received considerable attention in both academic and industrial research. [1,2] Of particular interest, for the replacement of the existing light sources, are organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) based on phosphorescent molecules. [3][4][5][6] The advantage of using these materials lies in the possibility to internally convert all the spin uncorrelated injected charges into light. Indeed, an internal quantum efficiency of nearly 100% has been achieved in devices based on the green-emitting organometallic complex Ir(ppy) 3 .[7]However, many unresolved issues are the subject of current research in order to implement efficient white light sources and expand the number of applications. In particular, the origin of the efficiency roll-off at high voltages, [8][9][10] the light outcoupling, [11,12] the long-term stability [13,14] and the generation of white light with an all-phosphor device [6,15] are subjects under intense investigation. White light generation is a key issue because of the wide range of applications involving full-color displays and lighting. [1,2] Among the different approaches, solution processed devices based on white light emitting molecules [16] have been demonstrated as well as thermally evaporated red, green and blue (RGB) blends [15] or stacks. To date, white light OLEDs (WOLEDs) with long term operational lifetimes have been obtained mainly with a combination of a blue fluorescent emitter [6] and phosphors for the other colors. Such an elegant approach relies on a well engineered harvesting of singlet and triplet excitons and requires therefore a precise doping of the RGB emitting dyes in the transporting hosts. In contrast, efficient WOLEDs based on blue phosphors can be obtained with all the emitters in one single layer, [17] simplifying the processing. Generally, however, blue phosphors have in the past turned out to be rather unstable. While a physical explanation for blue phosphor based device instability is still lacking, a shorter phosphorescence lifetime, eventually approaching the sub-microsecond time regime, would decrease the residence time of potentially unstable excited states. Moreover, processes detrimental to the efficiency, such as exciton charge-carrier quenching [8] or triplet-triplet annihilation, [9,10] could be strongly reduced with a faster exciton recombination. A shorter phosphorescence lifetime while maintaining high quantum efficiencies requires a large radiative rate. For organometallic complexes this rate is directly proportional to the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) matrix element involving the emitting triplet and the perturbing singlet state and inversely proportional to the degree of mixing between them, i.e., the singlet-triplet splitting (DE ST ). [18][19][20] Photophysical studies of the role of SOC and DE ST in tuning the radiative rate are still sparse, mainly because the large intersystem crossing (ISC) rates ($10 13 s À1 ) of such phosphors, [21] which makes detection (and therefore direct measurement of DE ST ) rather cha...

Copper nanowire (Cu NW) based transparent conductors are promising candidates to replace ITO (indium-tin-oxide) owing to the high electrical conductivity and low-cost of copper. However, the relatively low performance and poor stability of Cu NWs under ambient conditions limit the practical application of these devices. Here, we report a solution-based approach to wrap graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets on the surface of ultrathin copper nanowires. By mild thermal annealing, GO can be reduced and high quality Cu r-GO core-shell NWs can be obtained. High performance transparent conducting films were fabricated with these ultrathin core-shell nanowires and excellent optical and electric performance was achieved. The core-shell NW structure enables the production of highly stable conducting films (over 200 days stored in air), which have comparable performance to ITO and silver NW thin films (sheet resistance ∼28 Ω/sq, haze ∼2% at transmittance of ∼90%).