Highly conductive and transparent single-walled carbon nanotube thin films from ethanol by floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition

Abstract

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) films have great potential to replace indium tin oxide films for applications in transparent and conductive electronics. Here we report a high yield production of SWCNT transparent conducting films (TCFs) by the floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition method using ethanol as the carbon source. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report regarding SWCNT TCFs using ethanol as the carbon source. The fabricated uniform SWCNT TCFs exhibit a competitive sheet resistance of 95 Ω sq⁻¹ at 90% transmittance after doping with AuCl₃. The SWCNT TCFs possess high quality and the mean length of SWCNT bundles is approximately 27.4 μm. Furthermore, the concentration of semiconducting SWCNTs is 75–77%. Additionally, the chirality maps obtained from electron diffraction analysis demonstrate that our SWCNTs are biased towards the armchair type.