Two-beam laser fabrication technique and the application for fabricating conductive silver nanowire on flexible substrate

In this study, a two-beam laser fabrication technique is proposed to fabricate silver nanowire (AgNW) on the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. The femtosecond pulse laser in the technique plays a role in generating Ag nanoparticles from the silver aqueous solution by multiphoton photoreduction. The continuous wave (CW) laser of the technique works as optical tweezers, and make the Ag nanoparticles gather to a continuous AgNW by the optical trapping force. The optical trapping force of the CW laser was calculated under our experimental condition. The flexibility and the resistance stability of the AgNW that fabricated by this technique are very excellent. Compared to the resistance of the AgNW without bending, the decreasing rate of the AgNW resistance is about 16% under compressed bending condition at the radius of 1 mm, and the increasing rate of the AgNW resistance is only 1.3% after the AgNW bended about 3500 times at the bending radius of 1 mm. The study indicates that the AgNW is promising for achieving flexible device and would promote the development of the flexible electronics.