A facile and eco-friendly synthesis of graphene–silver hybrid materials for transparent conductive films

Recently, graphene–silver (GN–Ag) hybrid material has attracted a great attention to substitute indium tin oxide (ITO) and/or fluorine tin oxide (FTO) in the transparent conductive electrodes (TCE) due to their multifunctional extraordinary properties. However, the synthesis process of this hybrid material requires some toxic chemicals and complicated processes. Herein, we report a simple, an efficient and an environment-friendly approach to synthesize the graphene–silver nanoparticles (GN–AgNPs) hybrid material for transparent, conductive and flexible films, which can further be used in various modern optoelectronic devices. The morphological and structural characteristics of hybrids are studied via several techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectroscopy. The results of these analysis confirmed that silver AgNPs were successfully decorated on the surface of GN. Furthermore, the sheet resistance of the flexible films with this hybrid structure was significantly lower (~10-fold) than that of the GN-only deposited films at the wide range of transmittance.