Conducting Polymers

Abstract

Research into conducting polymers has been increasingly intense for the last 25 years, since MacDiarmid, Heeger and Shirakawa published their seminal work on polyacetylene, which demonstrated that the conductivity of these materials can be increased by several orders of magnitude by doping with anions [6,7]. The importance of these materials and the progress made in this field is reflected in the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 to these founding researchers in this area.However, to allow the widespread use of conducting polymers, more research is needed to improve their general performance, and one of their present limitations is the rapid degradation of key properties such as conductivity and electrochemical cyclability. This limitation is primarily a result of the electrolyte used in the