Metals have just gotten a makeover that turned their reflective surfaces see-through. What, you say, a transparent metal that also conducts electricity? Long thought impossible, such a material is being whipped up in a lab at Pennsylvania State Univ.
“There’s no other material that combines these supposedly mutually exclusive properties — optical trans-parency and electrical conductivity,” says Roman Engel-Herbert, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State.
The new transparent metal could someday replace the transparent conductor indium tin oxide (ITO) currently used in more than 90% of the display market, according to the researchers. Because ITO is used in most display technologies, the price has gone up in the last decade, Engel-Herbert notes.
“We are trying to use a completely different approach,” Engel-Herbert says.
For a material to conduct electricity, it needs free electrons to “carry the current,” Engel-Herbert explains. The difficulty is developing a material that also transmits light, making it...
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