The first highly conductive polyselenophene, namely, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxyselenophene) (PEDOS), was synthesized by taking advantage of a novel method for efficiently contracting the selenophene ring. PEDOS shows a relatively low band gap (1.4 eV), very high stability in the oxidized state, and a well-defined spectroelectrochemistry.

We report that linear oligomers of furan, which is a biodegradable molecule directly obtainable from biomass, could be used as organic semiconductors and show field effect mobilities similar to those of the corresponding thiophene analogues. Efficient fluorescence and increased solubility of oligofurans and their derivatives are two other important advantages for their application in organic electronics.

A systematic study of the electrochemical, spectroelectrochemical and electrochromic (EC) properties of poly (alkyl-3,4-ethylenedioxyselenophene) 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12) films is reported. The alkyl substituents lead PEDOS-C n films to exhibit sharper redox peaks than the parent PEDOS film and raise an onset of their oxidation potentials by 0.20-0.62 V. As expected, the introduction of alkyl chains significantly improves the EC properties and the electrochemical stability of PEDOS-C n films and results in high contrast ratios and coloration efficiencies, low switching voltages, and fast switching times. As the length of the alkyl chain increases, the broad absorption peak of PEDOS sharpens and splits into three distinct peaks for PEDOS-C n films starting from n ) 4. We have identified the correlations between EC properties (such as coloration efficiency) and other observed properties of PEDOS-C n films (such as their peak width, the position of the maximum absorption peak, the ratio of the absorption intensity of NIR spectra peaks to visible spectra peaks) and the contrast ratio. Interestingly, EC properties show bell-shaped behavior as a function of alkyl chain length, which reaches the maximum for PEDOS-C 6 film, whereas the EC properties of films with shorter and longer alkyl chains are poorer.

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A novel family of electrochromic materials has been discovered. The electropolymerized poly(hexyl‐3,4‐ethylenedioxyselenophene) film switches color between a highly absorbing pure blue and a nearly colorless bleached state, achieves both a high contrast ratio of 88–89% and a high CE of up to 773 cm2 C−1 while showing a fast switching time and remarkable stability with the contrast ratio remaining 48% after 10000 cycles.