Template Synthesis of Electronically Conductive Polymer Nanostructures

摘要

Nanochemistry is an emerging subdiscipline in the chemical and materials sciencesthat deals with the development of methods for synthesizing nanoscopic bits of a desired material and with chemical and other investigations of the nanomaterial obtained. My research group has been exploring a general method, called template-synthesis, for preparing nanomaterials. This method entails synthesizing the desired material within the pores of a nanoporous membrane. The membranes employed have cylindrical pores of uniform diameter. In essence, we view each of these pores as a nanobeaker in which a piece of the desired material is synthesized. We have used this method to prepare nanostructures composed of electronically conductive polymers, metals, semiconductors, and other materials. In this Accounts article, I discuss my work on template synthesis of electronically conductive polymer nanostructures. I will show that these conductive polymer nanostructures have interesting and unusual electronic properties and that these nanostructures provide an opportunity for exploring how molecular and supermolecular structure affect conductivity in conductive polymers.