De-densifying metallic nanowire networks using betweenness centrality

Silver nanowire networks show great promise as transparent conductors, but many nanowires in these materials participate only meagerly in conduction. Using graph theoretic measures to rank the importance of different nanowires, we show that such networks can be strategically de-densified to well below the percolation threshold while maintaining low resistance. This de-densification improves the network’s figure of merit by nearly 30% and reaches 70% of the theoretical maximum performance. The mathematical methods applied here are sufficiently general to apply to any networked material in which there is a non-monotonic relationship between density and performance.