Silver nanowires decorated with silver nanoparticles for low-haze flexible transparent conductive films

Abstract

Silver nanowires have attracted much attention for use in flexible transparent conductive films (TCFs) due to their low sheet resistance and flexibility. However, the haze was too high for replacing indium-tin-oxide in high-quality display devices. Herein, we report flexible TCFs, which were prepared using a scalable bar-coating method, with a low sheet resistance (24.1 Omega/sq at 96.4% transmittance) and a haze (1.04%) that is comparable to that of indium-tin-oxide TCFs. To decrease the haze and maintain a low sheet resistance, small diameter silver nanowires (similar to 20 nm) were functionalized with low-temperature surface-sintering silver nanoparticles (similar to 5 nm) using bifunctional cysteamine. The silver nanowire-nanoparticle ink stability was excellent. The sheet resistance of the TCFs was decreased by 29.5% (from 34.2 to 24.1 Omega/sq) due to the functionalization at a low curing temperature of 85 degrees C. The TCFs were highly flexible and maintained their stability for more than 2 months and 10,000 bending cycles after coating with a protective layer