Polymers show they're metal

摘要

Although certain polymers have long been known to conduct electricity, they seemed to differ from metals in other electronic and optical properties. A new form of polymer turns that relation on its head. The fact that the polymer polyacetylene reaches metallic levels of conductivity when chemically doped caused quite a stir when it was first reported in 1977. This was not just because conducting polymers might be of great practical use, but also because the underlying physics came as a surprise: the apparently free movement of electrons along the carbon-based backbone of a polymer chain was not widely anticipated. The discovery attracted the attention of many chemists, materials scientists and physicists, and by the mid-1990s several practical conducting polymeric materials had emerged.