High-Quality AZO/Au/AZO Sandwich Film with Ultralow Optical Loss and Resistivity for Transparent Flexible Electrodes

Hua Zhou, Jing Xie, Manfang Mai, Jing Wang, Xiangqian Shen, Shuying Wang, Lihua Zhang, Kim Kisslinger, Hui Qiong Wang, Jinxing Zhang, Yu Li, Junhong Deng, Shanming Ke*, Xierong Zeng

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

44 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Transparent flexible electrodes are in ever-growing demand for modern stretchable optoelectronic devices, such as display technologies, solar cells, and smart windows. Such sandwich-film-electrodes deposited on polymer substrates are unattainable because of the low quality of the films, inducing a relatively large optical loss and resistivity as well as a difficulty in elucidating the interference behavior of light. In this article, we report a high-quality AZO/Au/AZO sandwich film with excellent optoelectronic performance, e.g., an average transmittance of about 81.7% (including the substrate contribution) over the visible range, a sheet resistance of 5 ω/sq, and a figure-of-merit (FoM) factor of ∼55.1. These values are well ahead of those previously reported for sandwich-film-electrodes. Additionally, the interference behaviors of light modulated by the coat and metal layers have been explored with the employment of transmittance spectra and numerical simulations. In particular, a heater device based on an AZO/Au/AZO sandwich film exhibits high performance such as short response time (∼5 s) and uniform temperature field. This work provides a deep insight into the improvement of the film quality of the sandwich electrodes and the design of high-performance transparent flexible devices by the application of a flexible substrate with an atomically smooth surface.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)16160-16168
Number of pages9
JournalACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
Volume10
Issue number18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 May 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • film heater
  • interference behavior of light
  • mica
  • sandwich film
  • transparent flexible electrodes

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