Roll-Up TVs, Bendable Smartphones: Toward More Choices for Flexible Electronic Materials

Have you heard of foldable smartphones? How about the flexible television screen that rolls up into a box? Or the ultrathin “wallpaper” TVs that are just millimeters thick?

A future with foldable, bendable, flexible and ultrathin electronics is fast becoming our present. The materials responsible for these consumer goods are typically polymers — plastics — that conduct electricity. To better understand this promising class of substances, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a technique that uses light to quickly and accurately test materials’ conductivity — and potentially reveal behavior that other methods could not. Now, the NIST team has demonstrated the further usefulness of this light-based method by using it to uncover behavior in one polymer that no one had seen before.

The scientists report their results in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

The work is NIST’s latest contribution to the quest to develop measurement tools to study novel materials for use in all different kinds of electronic transmission, from bendable biosensors to mobile phones and