Meniscus-dragging deposition of single-walled carbon nanotubes for highly uniform, large-area, transparent conductors

We report the simple production of highly uniform single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) thin films with significant reduction of the conducting material consumption by applying an effective microliter-scale solution process. The transparent thin film conductors were formed directly on a rigid or flexible substrate within a short process time by dragging a meniscus of an aqueous SWCNT solution with a volume of tens of microliters. The easily controllable coating parameters enabled the fine-tuning of the film thickness on a nanometer scale. This coating process is well suited for large-area, bendable SWCNT thin films whose randomly interconnected networks exhibit two-dimensional percolation behavior.