Converting an Electrical Insulator into a Dielectric Capacitor: End-Capping Polystyrene with Oligoaniline

We report a simple and low-cost strategy to enhance the dielectric permittivity of polystyrene by up to an order of magnitude via incorporating an oligoaniline trimer moiety at the end of the polymer chains. The oligoaniline-capped polystyrene was prepared by a copper-catalyzed click reaction between azide-capped polystyrene and an alkyne-containing aniline trimer, which was doped by different acids. By controlling molecular weight of polystyrene, the end-capped polymers can be induced to form nanoscale oligoaniline-rich domains embedded in an insulating matrix. Under an external electric field, this led to an increase in dielectric polarizability while maintaining a low dielectric loss. At frequencies as high as 0.1 MHz, the dielectric permittivity and dielectric loss (tan δ) were ∼22.8 and ∼0.02, respectively. This strategy may open a new avenue to increasing the dielectric permittivity of many other commodity polymers while maintaining relatively low dielectric loss.