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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.