Prospects for Nanowire-Doped Polycrystalline Graphene Films for Ultratransparent, Highly Conductive Electrodes

Traditional transparent conducting materials such as ITO are expensive, brittle, and inflexible. Although alternatives like networks of carbon nanotubes, polycrystalline graphene, and metallic nanowires have been proposed, the transparency-conductivity trade-off of these materials makes them inappropriate for broad range of applications. In this paper, we show that the conductivity of polycrystalline graphene is limited by high resistance grain boundaries. We demonstrate that a composite based on polycrystalline graphene and a subpercolating network of metallic nanowires offers a simple and effective route to reduced resistance while maintaining high transmittance. This new approach of "percolation-doping by nanowires" has the potential to beat the transparency-conductivity constraints of existing materials and may be suitable for broad applications in photovoltaics, flexible electronics, and displays.