Silver nanowires have attracted much attention for use in flexible transparent conductive films (TCFs) due to their low sheet resistance and flexibility. However, the haze was too high for replacing indium-tin-oxide in high-quality display devices. Herein, we report flexible TCFs, which were prepared using a scalable bar-coating method, with a low sheet resistance (24.1 Ω/sq at 96.4% transmittance) and a haze (1.04%) that is comparable to that of indium-tin-oxide TCFs. To decrease the haze and maintain a low sheet resistance, small diameter silver nanowires (~20 nm) were functionalized with low-temperature surface-sintering silver nanoparticles (~5 nm) using bifunctional cysteamine. The silver nanowire-nanoparticle ink stability was excellent. The sheet resistance of the TCFs was decreased by 29.5% (from 34.2 to 24.1 Ω/sq) due to the functionalization at a low curing temperature of 85 °C. The TCFs were highly flexible and maintained their stability for more than 2 months and 10,000 bending cycles after coating with a protective layer.
We report a fully packaged and compact forward viewing endomicroscope by using a resonant fiber scanner with two dimensional Lissajous trajectories. The fiber scanner comprises a single mode fiber with additional microstructures mounted inside a piezoelectric tube with quartered electrodes. The mechanical cross-coupling between the transverse axes of a resonant fiber with a circular cross-section was completely eliminated by asymmetrically modulating the stiffness of the fiber cantilever with silicon microstructures and an off-set fiber fragment. The Lissajous fiber scanner was fully packaged as endomicroscopic catheter passing through the accessory channel of a clinical endoscope and combined with spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). Ex-vivo 3D OCT images were successfully reconstructed along Lissajous trajectory. The preview imaging capability of the Lissajous scanning enables rapid 3D imaging with high temporal resolution. This endoscopic catheter provides many opportunities for on-demand and non-invasive optical biopsy inside a gastrointestinal endoscope.
This Letter reports a fully packaged microelectromechanical system (MEMS) endoscopic catheter for forward imaging optical coherence tomography (OCT). Two-dimensional optical scanning of Lissajous patterns was realized by the orthogonal movement of two commercial aspherical glass lenses laterally mounted on two resonating electrostatic MEMS microstages at low operating voltages. The MEMS lens scanner was integrated on a printed circuit board and packaged with an aluminum housing, a gradient index fiber collimator, and an objective lens. A home-built spectral-domain OCT system with 60 kHz A-line acquisition rate was combined with the endoscopic MEMS catheter. Three-dimensional images of 256×256×995 voxels were directly reconstructed by mapping the A-line datasets along the Lissajous patterns. The endoscopic catheter can provide a new direction for forward endoscopic OCT imaging.
We report a novel MEMS fiber scanner with an electrothermal silicon microactuator and a directly mounted optical fiber. The microactuator comprises double hot arm and cold arm structures with a linking bridge and an optical fiber is aligned along a silicon fiber groove. The unique feature induces separation of resonant scanning frequencies of a single optical fiber in lateral and vertical directions, which realizes Lissajous scanning during the resonant motion. The footprint dimension of microactuator is 1.28 x 7 x 0.44 mm3. The resonant scanning frequencies of a 20 mm long optical fiber are 239.4 Hz and 218.4 Hz in lateral and vertical directions, respectively. The full scanned area indicates 451 μm x 558 μm under a 16 Vpp pulse train. This novel laser scanner can provide many opportunities for laser scanning endomicroscopic applications.
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