Fabrication of Conducting Polymer Nanowires using Blockcopolymer Nano-Porous Templates

Nanoporous templates have been used for the fabrication of nanostructured materials that have their potential applications in electronics, optics, magnetism, and energy storage. Here, we showed that nanoporous templates based on polystyrene-block- poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS-b-PMMA) were used for the preparation of high density nanowire arrays of polypyrrole (PPy), poly(3,4-ethlenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT), poly(3- hexyltiophene) (P3HT). We found that these conducting polymer nanowires showed much higher conductivity compared with conducting polymer films. This is because of the chain orientation of conducting polymer nanowires during the growing process inside the confined nanohole. The chain orientation of nanowires along the nanoporous template direction was characterized by HR-TEM, XRD and GI-WAXS.