Plastic are generally considered to be poor conductors of electricity, so they are used to make insulating jackets for wires. But Australian researchers have recently discovered that when a very thin layer of metal is applied to a plastic layer and mixed into the polymer surface using an ion beam, a cheap, strong, tough and conductive plastic film can be produced. This latest technology will make it possible to create a plastic product with the properties of metal or even a superconductor.

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The team that achieved this result was led by two experts from the University of Queensland in Australia, Professor Paul Meredith and Assistant Professor Ben Powell, and Professor Adam Micolich from the University of New South Wales. Their results have been published in the journal ChemPhysChem. The research is based on experiments conducted by former University of Queensland doctoral student Andrew Stephenson.

Ion beam technology is widely used in the microelectronics industry to test the conductivity of semiconductors such as silicon wafers. However, the attempt to apply this technology to plastic film materials only started in the 1980s, and there has been little progress until now. Professor Meridis said: "The work done by this team, in simple terms, is to use ion beam technology to change the properties of plastic film materials, so that they have metal-like functions, can conduct electricity like the wire itself, and can even become superconductors, and when the temperature drops to a certain level, the resistance becomes zero."

In order to show the potential application value of this material, the team used this material to make resistance thermometers in accordance with industrial standards. When compared with the same type of platinum resistance thermometers, the products made of the new material showed similar or even better performance.

"The interesting thing about this material is that we have retained almost all the advantages of high molecular polymers - mechanical flexibility, high strength, and low cost, but at the same time it has good conductivity, which is usually not a property that plastic should have." Professor Mikolin said. "This material has opened up a new world for plastic conductors."

And Andrew Stephenson believes that the most exciting thing about this technology is that the conductivity of this film can be precisely adjusted or set, which will have a very broad application prospect. He said: "In fact, we can change the conductivity of this material by 10 orders of magnitude. Simply put, it's like we have 10 billion options in our hands when making this material. In theory, we can make plastic that are completely non-conductive, or plastic that are as conductive as metals, and all the possibilities in between."

This new material can be easily manufactured using equipment commonly used in the current microelectronics industry, and compared with traditional polymer semiconductor materials, this new material has a much higher resistance to oxidation when exposed to oxygen. Researchers said that with all the above advantages, this thin film material obtained by ion beam treatment of polymers will have broad application prospects. It is a perfect fusion of modern and future technologies.

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