Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: The Japan Academy — File:Hideki Shirakawa.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0

Hideki Shirakawa

born 1936 · Japan · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 2000

Japanese polymer chemist who discovered electrically conductive plastics through iodine-doped polyacetylene.

Nobel Prize work

Shirakawa discovered that polyacetylene — a plastic made in his silvery film form — conducts electricity when doped with iodine, raising its conductivity by billions of times toward that of metals. Developed with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger, the finding created the field of conductive polymers behind OLEDs, plastic electronics and flexible devices.

Fields

Materials chemistryPolymer chemistry

Related topics

OLEDs, solar cells

How organic electroluminescent diodes turn injected charge into light, and how photovoltaic devices turn absorbed photons into useful electrical work.

Addition and condensation polymerization

How chain-growth addition and step-growth condensation build polymers, why their molecular-weight development differs, and how monomer structure determines repeat units and by-products.

Conducting and photoactive polymers

Understand how conjugation, morphology and doping govern charge transport and optical response in conducting polymers, then connect these mechanisms to organic electronic devices and current research.

Chemists in the same field

Alan J. Heeger (1936)Richard Robson (1937)Robert Curl (1933)Harold Kroto (1939)Dan Shechtman (1941)M. Stanley Whittingham (1941)