Abstract
Transparent conductors play an important role in modern electronics.Commercially, this area is dominated by doped metal oxides, most commonlyindium tin oxide (ITO). However, the future of ITO as the main material inthis area may be limited for economic and technical reasons. In short, anew material is required that must be compatible with low temperature,large area deposition and must be flexible. This is in addition todisplaying high transparency, T, and low sheet resistance, Rs. It has beenknown for the past few years that flexibility and low temperatureprocessing can be achieved by the deposition of nanostructured thin films,often from the liquid phase. These are known to be stable under flexingand can be deposit on flexible substrate. Like carbon nanotubes, graphenecan be dispersed in common solvents as well as surfactants and can bedeposited as thin film. The most significant materials studied till noware carbon nanotube (CNT), graphene, metal gratings, and random networksof metallic nanowires. CNT and Metal nanowires network have propertiesthat are promising. CNT-PEDOT composites and Graphene-CNT hybrid films arebetter than CNT only. For most nanostructured films thin enough to displayT > 90% (industrial requirement), the conduction can be described bypercolation theory. This means DC conductivities are lower than in bulk,giving correspondingly higher sheet resistances, Rs. To improve ourunderstanding of the consequences of this, we develop a model whichrelates T to Rs in the percolation regime.
