A New Transparent Conductor: Silver Nanowire Film Buried at the Surface of a Transparent Polymer

With the emergence of fl exible plastic devices and the scarcity of indium resources, great efforts have been made to develop new fl exible transparent conductors to replace indium tin oxide (ITO), [ 1,2 ] examples including conductive polymers, [ 3,4 ] carbon nanotubes (CNTs), [ 5–8 ] graphene, [ 9 ] metal grids, [ 10 ] and random networks of metallic nanowires. [ 11,12 ] Among these contenders, random silver nanowire (AgNW) networks show optoelectronic performances very close to that of ITO [ 11 , 13 ] and are regarded as the leading candidate material to replace ITO [ 14 ] (Table 1S in Supporting Information). There are two critical issues that currently prohibit AgNW fi lms from large scale applications: AgNW fi lms deposited on bare substrates are highly coarse [ 12 ]