Physicists at the University of Sussex are developing a new material for touch-screen devices that has already proved to be more flexible and to have higher conductivity than current technologies.
New research shows how silver could solve issues of touch-screen technologies. Physicists at the University of Sussex are developing a new material for touch-screen devices that has already proved to be more flexible and to have higher conductivity than current technologies. In collaboration with M-SOLV Ltd, a touchsensor manufacturer based in Oxford, Professor Alan Dalton and his team have shown that silver nanowires, which are more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair, are a viable alternative to the currently used material, indium tin oxide (ITO), which is expensive to source, expensive to process and - as anyone who has dropped their smartphone will know - very brittle. Their research, which is published in the journals Materials Today and Scientific Reports , looked to alternative materials to overcome the challenges of ITO, which is mined largely in China and Canada and is suffering from supply uncertainty. Graphene, carbon nanotubes and random metal nanowire films are among the alternatives being explored. But this study, carried out while Professor Dalton was at the University of Surrey, showed how silver nanowire films have emerged as the strongest competitor, due to transmittances and conductivities that can match and readily exceed those of ITO. Using a technique, called 'ablation', which involves the removal of material using a laser beam to produce individual electrode patterns, the team produced a fully operating five-inch multi-touch sensor, identical to those typically used in smartphone technology.
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