Flexible thiophene polymers: a concerted macromolecular architecture for dielectrics

The design of novel dielectric polymers currently employs approaches on capitalizing main-chain and side-chain architectures respectively. This paper reports a concerted macromolecular architecture synergistically tuning both the polymeric backbone and side chain. Our approach relies on an oligomer thiophene side chain and a norbornene backbone. This architecture results in highly flexible and transparent dielectric polymers, superior to methacrylate polymer counterparts. A facile hydrogenation of the polynorbornene backbone results in more than two fold increase in the electric field breakdown strength with the conservation of low dielectric loss.