The development of green flexible micro-supercapacitors (MSCs) is one of the biggest challenges in future wearable electronics. Flexible MSCs are mainly produced from non-biodegradable synthetic polymers, resulting in massive electronic waste. Moreover, complex multi-step fabrication increases their production cost. Here, the direct fabrication of highly conductive, intrinsically flexible, and green microelectrodes from naturally fallen leaves in ambient air using femtosecond laser pulses without any additional materials is reported. Hierarchically porous graphene is patterned on different types of leaves via a facile, mask-less, scalable, and one-step laser writing. Leaves consist of biominerals, which decompose into inorganic crystals that serve as nucleation sites for the growth of 3D mesoporous few-layer graphene. The femtosecond laserinduced graphene (FsLIG) microelectrodes formed on leaves have lower sheet resistance (23.3 Ω sq −1 ) than their synthetic polymer counterparts and exhibit an outstanding areal capacitance (34.68 mF cm −2 at 5 mV s −1 ) and capacitance retention (≈99% after 50 000 charge/discharge cycles). The FsLIG MSCs on a single leaf could easily power a light-emitting diode or a table clock and could be applied in wearable electronics, smart houses, and Internet of Things.
The realization of hybrid optics could be one of the best ways to fulfill the technological requirements of compact, light-weight, and multi-functional optical systems for modern industries. Planar diffractive lens (PDL) such as diffractive lenses, photonsieves, and metasurfaces can be patterned on ultra-thin flexible and stretchable substrates and be conformally attached on top of arbitrarily shaped surfaces. In this review, we introduce recent research works addressed to the design and manufacturing of ultra-thin graphene optics, which will open new markets in compact and light-weight optics for next-generation endoscopic brain imaging, space internet, real-time surface profilometry, and multi-functional mobile phones. To provide higher design flexibility, lower process complexity, and chemical-free process with reasonable investment cost, direct laser writing (DLW) of laser-induced-graphene (LIG) is actively being applied to the patterning of PDL. For realizing the best optical performances in DLW, photon-material interactions have been studied in detail with respect to different laser parameters; the resulting optical characteristics have been evaluated in terms of amplitude and phase. A series of exemplary laser-written 1D and 2D PDL structures have been actively demonstrated with different base materials, and then, the cases are being expanded to plasmonic and holographic structures. The combination of these ultra-thin and light-weight PDL with conventional bulk refractive or reflective optical elements could bring together the advantages of each optical element. By integrating these suggestions, we suggest a way to realize the hybrid PDL to be used in the future micro-electronics surface inspection, biomedical, outer space, and extended reality (XR) industries.
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