Yadan Deng,Jingzan Jiang,Jun Sun,Yufeng Hu,Qiuhong Cui,Zhenbo Deng,Zhidong Lou,Yanbing Hou,Feng Teng
Fabrication of nanowires in polymer films can dramatically enhance the mobility of thin-film transistors (TFTs). Unlike the popular method of forming nanowires after spin-coating films, here a water-bath method to fabricate the micrometer-long nanowires in the poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) solution is introduced, which is suitable for large-area printing electronic application. The resulting transistor exhibits significantly enhanced mobility and excellent device stability. However, the threshold voltage of the device is increased, compared with the amorphous film device. The underlying mechanism of the mesoscale crystalline induced threshold voltage increase has been rarely studied. The temperature-dependent characteristics imply that the activation energy of the device with nanowires is higher than that of the amorphous one, indicating nanowires can introduce deep traps. This suggests that the charge transport is mainly limited by the deep traps at the junctions between the nanowires considering the trap density inside the nanowires is significantly low. The deep traps introduced by the junctions can increase the threshold voltage as the device needs higher voltage to fill these traps in the channel before the device is turned on. This explains why the devices with nanowires have an increased threshold voltage while their mobilities are dramatically enhanced.
Electrode materials with hollow micro/nanostructures and high electrical conductivity are important for achieving high-power supercapacitors, especially those with super-fast charging/discharging. TiN, which can be easily obtained from TiO2, is regarded as a high-power supercapacitor material. Here, we report that a nanoscale Kirkendall effect is triggered by surface branches on TiO2 nanowires, which then transform into hollow TiN nanotrees during a thermal nitridation process. The surface branches play a key role in accelerating the initial reaction, which forms a uniform, continuous surface TiN layer and induces the Kirkendall effect via surface diffusion. The hollow TiN nanotrees have a high surface area, porous structure, and high electrical conductivity. The constructed symmetric supercapacitors exhibit high areal and volumetric energy density, super-fast charge/discharge ability, and good capacitance retention up to 350 000 cycles. This work provides a new method to synthesize hollow TiN nanostructures and demonstrates their advantages in achieving high-power energy storage devices.