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News Release 04-034

Polymer Chemists Assemble Nanowires and Nanoemitters


March 28, 2004

This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.

ARLINGTON, Va.—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.

Both groups work with techniques that are cost-effective and scalable to manufacturing environments. Further details of this work can be found in the following CMU press releases:

Carnegie Mellon University Chemist Announces One-Step Method to Produce Hightly Conductive Polymer Nanowires http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2004-03/cmucmu_1031904.php

Carnegie Mellon University Scientists Use Innovative Polymer Chemistry to Create Novel Carbon Nanoparticles with Vast Potential http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2004-03/cmu-cmu032404.php

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Peter West, NSF, (703) 292-7761, email: pwest@nsf.gov
Lauren Ward, CMU, (412) 268-7761, email: wardle@andrew.cmu.edu

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