New Generation of Lightweight, Flexible Solar Cells and Display Screens Using Transparent Graphene Electrodes

Graphene, a form of pure carbon whose atoms are arranged in a flat hexagonal array, has extremely good electrical and mechanical properties, yet it is vanishingly thin, physically flexible, and made from an abundant, inexpensive material. Furthermore, it can be easily grown in the form of large sheets by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), using copper as a seed layer. A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics. The new manufacturing process, which was developed at MIT and should be relatively easy to scale up for industrial production.