Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

Conductive Poly(sulfur nitride) — Mortimer Labes

1976 AD · Transmission: Silenced
PhysicsMaterialsDiscoveryNorth American

In 1975, Mortimer M. Labes's team at Temple University published in Physical Review Letters that poly(sulfur nitride), or (SN)x — an inorganic polymer — exhibited metallic properties and superconductivity at very low temperatures without needing chemical structural alteration. It was the first known polymer with quasi-one-dimensional metal behavior. This finding destroyed the dogma that polymers were necessarily insulators and was the direct conceptual trigger that led Alan Heeger and Alan MacDiarmid to search for an organic (carbon-based) equivalent. The connection is documented: MacDiarmid, who knew Labes's work, proposed to Heeger investigating the conductivity of organic polymers, culminating in the 1977 doping experiment on Shirakawa's polyacetylene.

InstitutionTemple University, Philadelphia
Historical regionUSA
Primary sourceLabes et al. — Physical Review Letters, vol. 36 (1976): DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.36.452. Band-structure paper: DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.35.869
Secondary sourceConductivity baseline (1974): Journal of Chemical Physics, 61(11), 4640
Original languageEnglish
View this entry in the interactive atlas → View in graph →