Formation of conducting polymer nanostructures with the help of surfactant crystallite templates

Abstract

An extremely simple approach is described here to synthesize bulk quantities of conducting polymer microspirals assembled from nanofibers by in situ chemical oxidative polymerization in the presence of a conventional surfactant. It is worth noting that the surfactant used in our approach is in crystalline state, which is quite different from micellar state in emulsional polymerization reported previously. The growth mecha-nism of the conducting polymer is proposed.

Keywords

conducting polymer / surfactant / spiral / crystal defect