Localization and Its Absence: A New Metallic State for Conducting Polymers

A widely held view in solid-state physics is that disorder precludes the presence of long-range transport in one dimension. A series of models has been recently proposed that do not conform to this view. The primary model is the random dimer model, in which the site energies for pairs of lattice sites along a linear chain are assigned one of two values at random. This model has a set of conducting states that ultimately allow an initially localized particle to move through the lattice almost ballistically. This model is applicable to the insulator-metal transition in a wide class of conducting polymers, such as polyaniline and heavily doped polyacetylene. Calculations performed on polyaniline demonstrate explicitly that the conducting states of the random dimer model for polyaniline are coincident with recent calculations of the location of the Fermi level in the metallic regime. A random dimer analysis on polyparaphenylene also indicates the presence of a set of conducting states in the vicinity of the band edge. The implications of this model for the metallic state in other polymers, including heavily doped polyacetylene, are discussed.