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POLYMER CHEMISTS ASSEMBLE NANOWIRES AND NANOEMITTERS
At the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society this weekend, two groups of polymer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Chemistry will describe novel nanostructures, created with chemical methods, which may lead to new generations of electronic devices and materials. Chuanbing Tang, a graduate student working with Professor Tomasz Kowalewski, will describe carbon-based structures created from polymer mixtures applied to a substrate. After the mixtures organize themselves into ordered films, the researchers crosslink the polymers to lock in the structure, and then carefully burn off selected material. Kowalewski's group, funded as part of an NSF Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team, believes this technique can be adapted to construct nanosensors, electron emitters for flat panel displays, and solar cells. Richard McCullough, dean of the Mellon College of Science, will describe his group's newest conducting polymers. McCullough and coworkers, also supported by NSF, have developed methods for attaching chemical "caps" to a class of conducting polymers they first synthesized in 1992. Changing the capping chemical leads to different affinities for attaching the molecule chains to various substrates or interacting with other polymers, allowing wide control over the mechanical and electrical properties of the materials. In one novel configuration, sheets of polymer nanowires are embedded in a second polymeric material.
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