The Organic Solid State.

This article, we hope, will encourage more chemists—particularly organic chemists—to think about and start research on organic materials that may exhibit interesting electrical, optical, or magnetic properties in the solid state. We now have an almost bewildering battery of techniques to study the solid state. Given this degree of readiness, opportunities are nearly unlimited for physical organic chemists to correlate structure with solid-state physical properties, as well as for organic and organometallic chemists to synthesize new and sometimes exotic compounds. The scientist who acts on these exciting challenges has the added opportunity and—usually—pleasure of a multidisciplinary effort involving almost all areas of theoretical and experimental chemistry, applied physics, materials science, and electrical engineering. In our work at Johns Hopkins University, supported by the materials science division of the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, we have encounter...