Alan Jay Heeger
Heeger, Alan Jay (1936- ) is an American physicist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Heeger, New Zealand-born American chemist Alan Graham MacDiarmid, and Japanese chemist Hideki Shirakawa discovered and developed plastic materials through which electric current can flow.
Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa, Jan. 22, 1936. In 1961, he received a doctorate 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 (in engineering) there.
Heeger, MacDiarmid, and Shirakawa conducted their research at the University of Pennsylvania, publishing their discovery in a scientific journal in 1977. They 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 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.
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.
This allowed scientists to combine the flexibility and low weight of plastics with the electric properties of metals. Lightweight, rechargeable batteries made of conductive polymers could replace polluting automobile engines with environmentally superior electric motors.
Heeger is the chief scientist of UNIAX Corporation, a company that he cofounded in 1990 to develop practical applications of polymers.