Giant conductance of PSS:PEDOT micro-surfaces induced by microbubble lithography

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that microbubble lithography can significantly enhance the electrical conductivity of PEDOT:PSS by interface engineering, achieving up to 20-fold increases without chemical doping.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of microbubble lithography to improve organic polymer conductivity through interface modification, without chemical doping.

Findings

Conductivity increased 5 times on glass (694 S/cm)

Conductivity increased 20 times on PDMS (2844 S/cm)

Interface engineering alters polymer conformation and reduces grain boundaries.

Abstract

We provide direct evidence of the effects of interface engineering of various substrates by Microbubble lithography (MBL). We choose a model organic plastic (or polymer) poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS), with conductivity of 140 S/cm, as a representative organic system to showcase our technique. Thus, we fabricate permanent patterns of PEDOT:PSS on glass, followed by a flexible PDMS substrate, and observe conductivity enhancement of 5 times on the former (694 S/cm), and 20 times (2844 S/cm) on the latter, without the use of external doping agents or invasive chemical treatment. Probing the patterned interface, we observe that MBL is able to tune the conformational states of PEDOT:PSS from coils in the pristine form, to extended coils on glass, and almost linear structures in PDMS due to its more malleable liquid-like interface. This results in higher ordering and vanishing grain boundaries leading to the highest conductivity of PEDOT:PSS on PDMS substrates.