New conducting polymers join polyacetylene

Two years ago Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid, Hideki Shirakawa and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania reported that by doping polyacetylene films, their electrical conductivities could be made to range over eleven orders of magnitude—from insulator to metal. That discovery generated great interest in the conducting and semiconducting properties of organic polymers. In recent months this interest has borne fruit with the discovery of new highly conducting polymers by groups at IBM, Allied Chemical and Xerox. Furthermore, considerable progress has been made in understanding the physical and chemical mechanisms underlying the remarkable electronic properties of these materials, and several groups have reported the successful production of p–n and Schottky junctions with these polymers.