This review describes recent advances and applications in the field of organic photorefractive materials, an interesting area in the field of organic electronics and promising candidate for various aspects of photonic applications. We describe the current state of knowledge about the processes involved in the formation of photorefractive gratings in organic materials and focus on the chemical and photo‐physical aspects of the material structures employed in low glass‐transition temperature amorphous composites and organic photorefractive glasses. State‐of‐the art materials are highlighted and recent demonstrations of photonic applications relying on the reversible holographic nature of the photorefractive materials are discussed.

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Photorefractive materials are dynamic holographic storage media that are highly sensitive to coherent light fields and relatively insensitive to a uniform light background. This can be exploited to effectively separate ballistic light from multiply-scattered light when imaging through turbid media. We developed a highly sensitive photorefractive polymer composite and incorporated it into a holographic optical coherence imaging system. This approach combines the advantages of coherence-domain imaging with the benefits of holography to form a high-speed wide-field imaging technique. By using coherence-gated holography, image-bearing ballistic light can be captured in real-time without computed tomography. We analyzed the implications of Fourier-domain and image-domain holography on the field of view and image resolution for a transmission recording geometry, and demonstrate holographic depth-resolved imaging of tumor spheroids with 12 microm axial and 10 microm lateral resolution, achieving a data acquisition speed of 8 x 10(5) voxels/s.

A novel surface functionalization technique is presented for large-scale selective molecule deposition onto whispering gallery mode microgoblet cavities. The parallel technique allows damage-free individual functionalization of the cavities, arranged on-chip in densely packaged arrays. As the stamp pad a glass slide is utilized, bearing phospholipids with different functional head groups. Coated microcavities are characterized and demonstrated as biosensors.

A new class of hole-transporting polymers for use in organic electronic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) or photorefractive holographic storage devices has been synthesized. The polymers contain tetraarylbenzidines or tetraarylphenylenediamines as charge-transporting units in the polymer backbone and are connected by non-conjugating fluorene bridges. For use in OLEDs the novel polymers were functionalized with oxetane groups that can be cross-linked via a cationic ring opening polymerization to yield insoluble networks. Such insoluble films are necessary for the fabrication of multilayer devices by wet deposition techniques. The novel materials feature improved film-formation properties as demonstrated in green-emitting double-layer OLEDs.