Compared to inorganic materials, the low stability of electronically active conjugated polymers has been a long-standing challenge that hampers not only their large scale applications, but also fundamental understanding of their properties. The stability issue spans across several orders of magnitudes length scales from molecular level structure to macroscopic scale morphology. Addressing this challenge requires the efforts from multiple disciplines. From a chemistry point of view, the incorporation of ladder-type constitution into conjugated polymers has been envisioned as a fundamental approach to solve the stability issue. Here I would like to discuss examples of extraordinarily stable conjugated ladder polymers. These polymers can survive and function in unconventionally harsh conditions thanks to their significantly enhanced stability enabled by the fully fused backbone constitution. The use of ladder-type structure represents a promising opportunity to address the stability challenges in this field.

Stability challenges of conjugated polymers and opportunities offered by ladder-type structure

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