Method for manufacturing electrical conductors, and electrical conductors manufactured according to same
AssigneeEcole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (Epfl)
InventorsArthur Hirsch, Hadrien Michaud, Ivan Rusev Minev, Stephanie P. Lacour
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Abstract
A method for manufacturing an electrical conductor includes: depositing a solid metal conductive layer or film on a substrate 30; depositing a liquid metal on the solid layer; and allowing the liquid metal and the solid layer 40 to alloy by diffusion of the liquid metal into the solid layer or film so as to form a solid conductive layer or film of the alloy; as well as allowing the liquid metal to further infiltrate the alloy so as to form percolating paths and/or droplets of the liquid metal in the the solid conductive layer or film, thus forming a biphasic conductive layer.
Claims11
A method for manufacturing an electrical conductor, said method comprising:
- depositing a solid metal layer on a substrate;
- depositing a liquid metal on said solid metal layer;
- allowing said liquid metal and said solid metal layer to form an alloy by diffusion of said liquid metal into said solid metal layer so as to form a solid conductive layer of said alloy;
- allowing said liquid metal to further wet and infiltrate said alloy so as to form percolating paths of said liquid metal in said solid conductive layer, thus forming a biphasic conductive layer comprising said alloy as a solid phase and said percolating paths of said liquid metal as a liquid phase dispersed in the solid phase;
- allowing said liquid metal to further accumulate into bulges, locally yet randomly, on or within said biphasic conductive layer;
- and
- controlling a ratio n between a total number of atoms of said liquid metal and a total number of atoms of said solid metal in said biphasic layer to be between 2 and 50.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.