Enhanced Plasmonic Welding of Silver Nanowire Junctions by Exerting Mechanical Compression during UV Irradiation

It is demonstrated experimentally that the efficiency of UV plasmonic welding between silver nanowires (AgNWs) can be improved by exerting the mechanical compression reducing the gap between individual nanowires during the UV irradiation. With this compression-assisted plasmonic welding, the sheet resistance of AgNW film is measured to decrease substantially with almost no change of transparency in comparison with conventional plasmonic welding. The secondary electron microscopy image shows that the mechanical compression can increase the number of welded junctions, leading to the decrease of sheet resistance eventually. The sheet resistance of the conducting film formed by spin-coating AgNWs five times on glass substrate is found to decrease from ~74.1 ??/sq to ~46.9 ??/sq with ~97.4% of transparency by adopting the compression-assisted plasmonic welding after each spin-coating step