Flexible and transparent electrodes imprinted from metal nanostructures: morphology and opto-electronic performance

Abstract

We directed the self-assembly of nanoscale colloids via direct nanoimprint lithography to create flexible transparent electrodes (FTEs) with metal line widths below 3 μm in a roll-to-roll-compatible process. Gold nanowires...

Flexible and transparent electrodes imprinted from Au nanowires: stability and ageing

“…S3 in the ESI † ) of up to h max = 68 ± 14 nm. 15 A relevant fraction of OAm has apparently been removed. This likely turns the core partially porous, too.…”

“…Plasma sintering of AuNW grids is self-limiting, 38 however, and excludes full sintering of the thick lines imprinted at high c Au that have the best performance. 15 The shell shields the core from the plasma and contains the (partially fragmented) OAm. We are not aware of any other existing sintering technique that could retain the structure of the printed lines but remove all organic content.…”

“…Dried films of Clevios™ P exhibit conductivities of 5 S cm −1 , 50 five orders of magnitude below that of the Au shells. 15 We used dip-coating to prepare electrodes with adsorbate layers of PEDOT:PSS. Excess PEDOT:PSS was removed by washing in water to retain only the adsorbed film; some samples were not washed to retain a thicker capping layer after drying.…”

“…In our previous work, 15 we studied the effect of the grid line morphology of AuNW-derived FTEs on their opto-electronic performance as a function of gold concentration c Au and found that plasma sintering removed the insulating OAm ligands only partially. The plasma-sintered lines have thin conductive Au shells covering an insulating hybrid core.…”

“…Here, we report on the stability of grid-like FTEs imprinted from AuNW. Arrays of about 1.6 μm wide, parallel lines with a pitch of 19.5 μm and heights of up to ≈275 nm were imprinted with inks of different c Au on PET foils as in Engel et al , 15 analyzed with small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), and sintered in H 2 /Ar plasma. Their R sh was monitored during storage under ambient conditions in the dark and correlated with the grid morphology from scanning (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM).…”