Nobel Prize

    (press release, information for the public, advanced information, suggested web links to institutions and companies etc), The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (advanced) on the Nobel Prize 2000, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Conductive Polymers, M.G.Kanatzidis, Chem. Eng. News 3, p. 36, 1990. Plastic Electronics, D. de Leeuw, Physics World, p. 31,…

Just now the most intensive development is aimed at conjugated polymers in their un-doped, semiconductive state. This is because it was discovered ten years ago that some conjugated polymers exhibit electro-luminescence, they glow when a voltages passes through them.      Many applications are predicted for luminescent plastic. We shall soon be seeing the first practical…

Contents:  » These pages are based on material from the 2000 Nobel Poster for Chemistry.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2000 jointly to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa “for the discovery and development of conductive polymers”. Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing how plastic can be…

Plastics are polymers, molecules formed of many identical units bound to each other like pearls in a necklace. For a polymer to be electrically conductive it must “imitate” a metal – the electrons in the bonds must be freely mobile and not bound fast to the atoms. One condition for this is that the polymer…

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I was born on a bitter cold morning (20º F below zero) in Sioux City (Iowa) on January 22, 1936. I was told that when my father went out in the cold that morning to go to the hospital to visit his wife and newborn first son, his car would not start. Despite advice to…

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