The focus of this thesis is to develop novel holographic photopolymers with high performance and summarize the fundamental understanding gained from such process. The performance of holographic photopolymers mainly refers to two parameters here, i.e., refractive index modulation and haze, which usually limit the development of emerging holographic applications in areas like data storage and see-through display. To improve the two parameters, a variety of chemical strategies were utilized and investigated. Firstly, high-refractive-index thiol-ene monomers were utilized together with a reactive linear polymer binder to achieve an extremely high refractive index modulation over 0.04. With the help of reactive binders, diffusional blurring that lowers the achievable refractive index modulation at high spatial frequency was significantly alleviated. Next, the effects of diffusion and reaction on the performance of holographic photopolymers were studied in the above-mentioned thiol-ene system by employing various chemical methods to alter the diffusion and reaction processes. In the study, an optimum ratio between reaction and diffusion was found to be crucial for achieving high performance in a specific material system, while the alteration of radical stability, reactivity of reactive binder and gel point of writing monomers all had an impact on the performance. Based on these trends, allyl sulfide moieties capable of addition-fragmentation chain transfer were introduced into polymer binder to realize the light-regulated viscosity reduction of recording media to improve the performance of formulations where the diffusion of monomer is limited; meanwhile, a low haze was maintained by a potential crosslinking between photopolymer and binder due to the dynamic exchange. Additionally, through the control of reaction kinetics and thermodynamics, haze in a conventional two-stage holographic photopolymer was systematically studied and largely reduced.</p
