Electrically active polymers: an overview

Abstract

The advent of organic materials for electroluminescent devices has allowed a wide variety of applications in displays, communications, sensors, and the like. The demonstration of organic magnetic materials has offered the challenge of finding polymer (organic) materials in which there is sufficient electronic exchange as well as stability, both thermally and chemically. The intrinsically conductive and semiconductive polymers have allowed designers the liberties of flexibility and conductivity to meet needs from batteries to solar cells. This paper gives an overview of this search past, present, and future and the synthesis of promising new complex polymer building blocks which can yield conductive, semiconductive, luminescent, ferro-, ferri-, and superparamagnetic materials for devices of the future in power, storage, displays, and communications devices. The use of these materials to produce electrically active polymeric materials has changed our way of thinking about how to fabricate devices with properties hertofore unrealizable.