Is there anyway to test or verify that the polymer is intrinsically conductive or there is no any doping effects?
As doping is by definition is a kind of "impurity" effect the only way to test this hypothesis is - on the one hand - to increse the purity of your sample or to add consciously dopants - on the other hand - and look at conductivity changes.
If you wish to measure the conductivity of a conducting polymer, you can use a monolithic micro-four-point probe with AFM observation. If the fixed linear probe spacing is an issue for you, microscopic 12-point probes have also been commercialised and might suit you better. Another method would be to use the microscopic-four-point probe with a scanning tunnelling microscope. This will enable you to obtain atomic resolution for your conductance measurements.
I am not sure I fully understand your question:
(1)
" Is there any way to test or verify that the polymer is intrinsically conductive? " sure, you need to measure conductivity and make sure you do not have ionic, but electronic conductivity.
- I disagree with Muqsit Minhaj Pirzada regarding "atomic resolution for conductance measurement", as conductivity is not a phenomenon happening on atomic scale, but depending upon whether your conductive polymer's conductivity is more that of an insulator or more that of a true metal, you will either have only hopping (tunneling) conductance mechanism or even metallic electron flow (coupled with hopping)
(or is there any way to test) " there is no any doping effects? " (I rewrote your 2nd part of the question somehow and hope I understood it correctly). See part 2 of my answer for this question.
(2)
(2) rewritten 2nd part of your question:
(or is there any way to test) " there is no any doping effects? "
- this question is probably due to a misunderstanding and misuse of the term "doping" in the conductive polymer field beginning end of the 1970s.
To my knowledge, there is no (intrinsically) conductive polymer which is conductive without "doping" - however, these polymers are not "doped" in the same sense of "doping" in semiconductors. To generate a conductive polymer, you start with a conjugated polymer and let it stoechiometrically precise react with a suitable agent which
- either oxidizes
- or protonates
every second monomer unit of the conjugated polymer. This way, you got a positive charge formally spoken on every 2nd monomer unit which is coupled with a negative counterion. (in reality, the positive charges are delocalized, for an example how such a polymer is structured, see Article New Insight into Organic Metal Polyaniline Morphology and Structure
)So, none of these polymers which are called "(intrinsically) conductive polymers" are doped although people say and write so (and I do as well while knowing this is the wrong term).
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