Silver nanowire-indium zinc oxide composite flexible transparent conducting electrodes made by spin-coating and photonic curing

Flexible transparent conducting electrodes (TCE) play a critical role in modern technologies. Eliminating the high-temperature annealing of vacuum- or solution-deposited films will increase production throughput and lower the cost of the final products. Photonic curing uses intense pulses of broadband light to induce material transformations instead of heat. In this work, we combine solution deposition and photonic curing, replacing thermal annealing, to fabricate flexible composite TCE films on plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. The composite TCE films are composed of spin-coated silver nanowire-indium zinc oxide layers. The TCE films’ electrical, optical, and morphological properties are investigated and compared to those of commercially available PET/TCE. A sheet resistance of 15 Ω/sq and an average transmittance from 400 to 700 nm of 77% are achieved with the spin-coated and photonic-cured composite flexible TCE films. Graphical abstract