Gold nanowires improve stretchable, transparent electrodes

Ars Technica : Flexible electrodes are common in medical applications, but most of the materials used still have problems handling repeated cycles of stretching and relaxing. Having them be stretchable as well as transparent reduces the number of possible materials even further. A team of researchers led by Ching-Wu Chu of the University of Houston has made a significant breakthrough by adding a mesh of gold nanowires to a pre-stretched transparent polymer. When the polymer is relaxed, it creates slack in the gold mesh. By varying the amount of the pre-stretching and the method of depositing and bonding the mesh, the researchers were able to find a method that allowed the electrodes to stretch to double their size over 54 000 cycles without any degradation of structure or functionality. The electrodes also proved to be nontoxic and biocompatible, and they allow proteins and other biomolecules to pass freely.