Heeger, Alan Jay (1936-…), an American physicist, won a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He received this award for the discovery and development of plastic materials in which electric current can flow. Ordinary plastic materials cannot conduct (carry) current. Heeger shared the Nobel Prize with two colleagues in this work, New Zealand-born American chemist Alan G. MacDiarmid and Japanese chemist Hideki Shirakawa. The three scientists conducted the research that led to their prize at the University of Pennsylvania. They published their discovery in a scientific journal in 1977.
Heeger and his colleagues won the prize for their work on special polymers, the basic substances of which plastics are made. A polymer is a huge molecule formed by the joining of many smaller molecules into a long chain. The small building units are called monomers. A monomer, in turn, consists of two or more joined atoms. The atoms within a monomer are joined to each other by connections known as bonds. Bonds between atoms also join the monomers that make up a polymer.
There are several kinds of bonds. Heeger and his colleagues developed conducting polymers by manipulating covalent bonds. A covalent bond consists of a pair of electrons that are shared by two atoms. An ordinary electric current is a flow of electrons; the manipulation of the bonds freed a small number of electrons from bonds so that these electrons could flow.
A number of products use conductive polymers, and others are being developed. Major applications include antistatic materials for photographic film; solar cells, which use sunlight to generate electric power; and displays in mobile telephones and television sets.
Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1961, he received a Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and a full professor there in 1967. From 1974 to 1981, he directed the university’s Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter.
Heeger became a professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1982. In 1987, he also became a professor of materials there. In addition, Heeger is the chief scientist of UNIAX Corporation, a company that he cofounded in 1990 to develop practical applications of polymers.
