New study sets benchmark properties for popular conducting plastic

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Atomic force microscopy image of aligned nanofibrils of a highly conducting plastic. Each nanofibril is made of stacks of regioregular polythiophene (RRP) molecules. Charge carriers move particularly well along the length of RRP molecules perpendicul ...
Atomic force microscopy image of aligned nanofibrils of a highly conducting plastic. Each nanofibril is made of stacks of regioregular polythiophene (RRP) molecules. Charge carriers move particularly well along the length of RRP molecules, perpendicular to the rows of nanofibrils. Credit: Image courtesy of Tomasz Kowalewski, Carnegie Mellon University

Steadily increasing the length of a purified conducting polymer vastly improves its ability to conduct electricity, report researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, whose work appeared March 22 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Their study of regioregular polythiophenes (RRPs) establishes benchmark properties for these materials that suggest how to optimize their use for a new generation of diverse materials, including solar panels, transistors in radio frequency identification tags, and light-weight, flexible, organic light-emitting displays.


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