Conductivity of polymer chains: A tunneling approach

Abstract

We investigate the effect of disorder in the conductivity of polyaniline chains. We adopt a tunneling approach coupled to a simplified Hamiltonian, in which we model the ring-structured polymer as a linear chain of pseudoatoms. To adjust the Hamiltonian parameters, we rely on previously published data on the electronic structure for such chains. Our results agree with available data on the behavior of conductivity with protonation dose, and thus give support to the disordered-chain model of polyanilines.