Hierarchically oriented jellyfish-like gold nanowires film for elastronics

Stretchable electronics (i.e., Elastronics) are essential to the realization of next-generation wearable bioelectronics for personalized medicine, due to their unique skin-conformal features ideal for seamless integration with the human body. Significant progress has been made to nanowire-based elastronics with promising applications ranging from electronic-skin to advanced energy harvest systems. However, it remains a key challenge to rationally control over the nanowire morphology and configurations to achieve desired multifunctionality. Herein, a stretchable jellyfish-like gold nanowires film with high conductivity and stretchability is presented by using gold nanostar-seeded nanowire growth method. They exhibit unique hierarchically oriented structure with gold nanostars as the multi-branched active sites (top layer) and vertically intertwined nanowires (bottom layer) trailing below the nanostars. Such nanowires film can be stretched up to 200% with a retaining low normalized resistance of 13.8 due to the unique hierarchical structure. Furthermore, the film can be used as stretchable supercapacitor with a 92% capacitance retention and superior durability even after 5000 electrochemical scanning cycles. The method is general, which can be further expanded to other metallic seeds, hence, representing a low-cost yet efficient strategy for the fabrication of stretchable elastronics and robust energy storage devices for on-body biosensing and bioelectronics.