Abstract
Transparent electrodes (TEs) with high chemical stability and excellent flexibility are critical for flexible optoelectronic devices, such as photodetectors, solar cells, and light-emitting diodes. Ultrathin metal electrode (thickness less than 20 nm) has been a promising TE candidate, but the fabrication can only be realized by vacuum-based technologies to date, and require tedious surface engineering of the substrates, which are neither ideal for polymeric based flexible applications nor suitable for roll-to-roll large-scale manufacture. This paper presents high-performance nanostructured transparent metal electrodes formation via displacement–diffusion-etch (DDE) process, which enables the solution-processed sub-20-nm-thick ultrathin gold electrodes (UTAuEs) on a wide variety of hard and soft substrates. UTAuEs fabricated on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates show a high chemical/environmental stability and superior bendability to commercial flexible indium–tin-oxide (ITO) electrodes. Moreover, flexible organic solar cells made with UTAuEs show similar power conversion efficiency but much enhanced flexibility, in comparison to that of ITO-based devices.
Highlights
We studied the influence of Cu layer thickness calculated figure of merit (FoM) of the UTAuEs were 0.13, 1.3, 0.076, and 0.00034 × 10−3 Ω−1 for 1.25, 2.5 5.0, and 10.0 mM HAuCl4, respectively
DDE is a versatile chemical process, which enables the solutionbased fabrication of nanostructured ultrathin metal electrodes on a wide variety of substrates
In comparison to commercial indium–tin oxide (ITO)/polyethylene terephthalate (PET) electrodes, UTAuEs fabricated with the DDE process on PET showed similar FoM, but much improved mechanical flexibility and environmental stability
Summary
Most solution-processed transparent electrodes reported to date are based on mesh-like structures, which are fabricated either by casting of metal nanowires or patterning of microscale metal meshes[14,15,16,17,18]. The metal offers high electric conductivity while the mesh-like structure provides the optical transparency to achieve a high figure of merit (FoM)[19,20]. Ultrathin metal electrodes made of continuous thin layers (
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