A novel negative dielectric constant material based on phosphoric acid doped poly(benzimidazole)

Metamaterials or artificial negative index materials (NIMs) have generated great attention because of their unique electromagnetic properties. The main challenge in current NIM development is creating a homogenous NIM without the need of complex geometric architectures consisting of capacitors and inductors or aggregated fillers, but possessing a tunable plasma frequency. A natural material that can exhibit negative values for permittivity and permeability simultaneously has not been found, or discovered. If one can design a negative dielectric constant material with a tunable plasma frequency of interest, implementing negative permeability into the material or system would be much more readily achievable to create a metamaterial. In this regard, a novel negative dielectric constant material, which is an essential key to creating the NIMs, was developed by doping ions into a polymer, a protonated poly(benzimidazole) (PBI). The doped PBI showed a negative dielectric constant at frequencies of kHz to MHz because of its reduced plasma frequency and an induction effect. As temperature increased, the dielectric spectrum changed from a relaxation to a resonance behavior and exhibited a larger magnitude of negative dielectric constant at a lower frequency. The conductivity of the doped PBI measured as a function of both temperature and frequency followed the same trend as the dielectric constant. With respect to the dielectric constant and the conductivity data, it can be assumed that the origin of the negative dielectric constant is attributed to the resonance behavior of the highly mobile ions at elevated temperatures and high frequencies. (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012