- Person
- Alan Heeger
- Lived
- b. 1936
- Field
- Materials physics
- From
- American
The story
Plastic is the classic insulator: it is wrapped around electric wires precisely because electricity cannot pass through it. Alan Heeger, a physicist born in Iowa to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, helped prove that this need not be so.
At the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s, Heeger teamed up with the chemist Alan MacDiarmid to study materials that conduct electricity in unusual ways. On a trip to Japan, MacDiarmid met Hideki Shirakawa, who had made shiny, silvery films of the simple plastic polyacetylene, and the Americans invited him to Penn. In 1977 the three reported that when polyacetylene was treated, or doped, with iodine, its conductivity increased millions of times, turning an insulating plastic into one that conducted almost like a metal. Heeger and colleagues then helped explain the physics of how charges move along the polymer chains.
The discovery created a new branch of science and technology, organic electronics, in which carbon-based plastics replace metals and silicon. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he moved in 1982, Heeger co-founded a leading research centre for polymers and organic solids, learned to make conducting polymers that could be dissolved and printed, and founded the company UNIAX to develop polymer light-emitting displays; DuPont bought it in 2000. In 1992 a researcher in his group discovered ultrafast transfer of electrons from light-absorbing polymers to carbon-60 molecules, a key step toward plastic solar cells that can be printed on flexible sheets.
Today conducting and semiconducting polymers are found in antistatic coatings, in layers of OLED displays used in phones and televisions, in printed sensors and biosensors, and in flexible and wearable electronics. Heeger shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with MacDiarmid and Shirakawa. When UC Santa Barbara celebrated his 90th birthday in 2026, its dean of sciences said he had launched the entire field of organic electronics.
Why it matters
Conductive plastics underpin organic electronics, from layers in OLED screens to printed sensors and lightweight, flexible solar cells.
About Alan Heeger
Iowa-born physicist who co-discovered plastics that conduct electricity, launching the field of organic electronics behind OLED screens, flexible devices and printable solar cells. Nobel Prize 2000.
Sources
- Popular information: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000 NobelPrize.org
- Alan Heeger, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- UCSB chemistry Nobel laureate Alan Heeger celebrates his 90th birthday with a symposium UC Santa Barbara
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.