Alan J. Heeger (born January 22, 1936,Sioux City,Iowa, U.S.) is an American chemist who, withAlan G. MacDiarmid andShirakawa Hideki, won theNobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery that certainplastics can be chemically modified to conductelectricity almost as readily asmetals.

After receiving a Ph.D. inphysics from theUniversity of California at Berkeley in 1961, Heeger taught and conducted research at theUniversity of Pennsylvania until 1982, when he became professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and director of its Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids; he stepped down as director in 1999. In 1990 Heeger founded the UNIAX Corporation to develop and manufacture light-emitting displays based on conductingpolymers; UNIAX was acquired by the American corporationDuPont in 2000. In 2001 he cofounded Konarka Technologies to produce thin, flexiblesolar cells made of plastic; the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 and was liquidated.

Heeger, MacDiarmid, and Shirakawa carried out their prizewinning work while studyingpolyacetylene, apolymer that was known to exist as ablack powder. In 1977 the three men,collaborating at the University of Pennsylvania, exposed polyacetylene toiodine vapour. Their strategy was to introduce impurities into the polymer much as in the doping process used to tailor the conductive properties ofsemiconductors. Doping with iodine increased polyacetylene’s electricalconductivity by a factor of 10 million, which made it as conductive as some metals. The finding led scientists to discover other conductive polymers and contributed to the emerging field of molecular electronics.

Britannica Quiz

Faces of Science