Lessons learned from research on photorefractive polymers and molecular materials

Organic photorefractive (PR) materials are a new kind of electrooptic substance that emerged 10 years ago. These are very complicated materials that possess both electrooptic effects and photoconductivity. It is challenging to integrate these properties into a single polymer system that will exhibit this PR effect. This article highlights our efforts in the past nine years in synthesizing and characterizing fully functionalized organic PR materials. I emphasize the lessons we have learned from this research, which may be more valuable to those who are interested in this area.