Little's Proposal for a Superconducting Organic Polymer

It is shown that electrons constrained to move along a narrow cylinder are ineffective in screening the Coulomb field of a test charge. Little's attractive interaction between the electrons of a certain type of polymer is insufficiently large to overcome the unscreened Coulomb repulsion between electrons, and it is therefore improbable that a polymer of this type will be superconducting. An additional argument suggests that this failure of the Little model is not accidental, and that superconducting behavior can never be produced by constraints imposed on an electron gas.