This work presents recent advances in photorefractive polymer composites towards improved efficiency, speed, persistence of holograms and sensitivity at both visible and near infrared wavelengths. Besides the pure performance characteristics, a thin-device approach is presented to reduce operating voltage of these devices to practical levels and these materials are analyzed in both reflection and transmission geometries.; The thin device operating at 1.3kV holds erasable, Bragg holograms with 80% efficiency in addition to its video-rate response time. The transition of hologram state from 'thick' to 'thin' is analyzed in detail. On the near IR portion of spectrum, new photorefractive polymer composites have been developed that enable high performance operation at 845nm and 975nm. Utilizing our novel photorefractive materials we demonstrate large diffraction efficiency in four-wave mixing experiments and video-rate response times. A major step towards achieving submillisecond response times is obtained through recording photorefractive gratings with individual nanosecond pulses at 532nm. At 4 mJ/cm2 illumination, a maximum diffraction efficiency of 56% has been obtained with a build-up time of only 300mus (t1). This fast response enables applications in optical processing requiring frame rates of 100Hz or more. Due to the short duration of the writing pulses, the recording is insensitive to vibrations. Combining molecules that have different frontier orbital energies in a copolymer system and utilizing thermal fixing approach has led to long grating lifetimes of more than several hours. Later, in this dissertation, two low-glass-transition photorefractive polymer composites are investigated in reflection geometry. 60% is diffraction efficiency is observed in 105mum thick devices of a PVK based composite. The reflection holograms are more sensitive to reading angle and slight birefringence due to the poling of chromophores has proven to cause a Bragg mismatch.
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