UV-laser-assisted synthesis of iodine-doped electrical conductive polythiophene

In this paper, a new method of UV-laser-assisted polymerization of iodine-doped polythiophene is presented. For the reason of intrinsic doping during the UV-irradiation, iodinated thiophene is chosen as the basic monomer. Due to the photochemical activation of the thiophene ring by UV-photons, the photoinduced polymerization of thiophene is expected to form thin polymeric layers added with iodine molecules serving as a doping agent. The generated thin polymeric layers are characterized by FTIR and XPS. By these spectroscopic measurements, the mechanism of the UV-photoinduced polymerization process and the simultaneous intrinsic doping mechanism have been clarified. Some rough measurements of the electrical conductivity yield values of low ohmic resistance for the synthesized polymer.