Hideki Shirakawa

Hideki Shirakawa is a Japanese chemist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering and developing electrically conductive polymers, especially polyacetylene.

Alan G. MacDiarmid: A chemist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on electrically conductive polymers. He collaborated with Shirakawa and helped show that doped polyacetylene conducts electricity.
Polyacetylene: A polymer made from repeating acetylene units, with alternating single and double bonds along its chain. Shirakawa produced polyacetylene films that became the central material in his conductivity research.
Tokyo Institute of Technology: A national research university in Tokyo, Japan, founded in 1881. Shirakawa carried out the polyacetylene research there that produced the unusual silvery films.
Organic electronics: Electronics that use carbon-based molecules or polymers as active materials. Conductive polymers helped establish organic materials as components for electronic devices.
Alan J. Heeger: A physicist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on electrically conductive polymers. He joined MacDiarmid and Shirakawa in demonstrating the effects of doping polyacetylene.
Chemical doping: The deliberate addition of chemical species that changes a material’s electronic properties. Doping polyacetylene with iodine dramatically increased its electrical conductivity.
Polyacetylene synthesis: The chemical production of polyacetylene, commonly through polymerization of acetylene gas. A catalyst concentration mistake during this synthesis yielded an unusually coherent film.
Organic light-emitting diode: A light-emitting device in which an organic semiconductor emits light under electrical excitation. Conductive and semiconducting polymers became useful materials in some OLED architectures.
Hideki Shirakawa laboratory discovery: The accidental preparation of silvery polyacetylene films through a catalyst concentration error. This 1967 laboratory episode began the research that led to Shirakawa’s Nobel-recognized work.
Conjugated polymer: A polymer whose chain contains overlapping p orbitals and a delocalized system of electrons. Polyacetylene’s conjugated structure allows chemical doping to create mobile charge carriers.

Linked from 3 pages