Polymers are increasingly being pushed as new materials for electronics and optics. Necessary elements for this imperative are of course the fimctional properties but with the added advantage of polymer processability and flexibility in structural design. For optical technology applications polymers with second and third order nonlinearity and photo and electric field driven light emission are of tremendous current interest. In this paper a new photodynamic polymer mass transport process is

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... ribed that can be used to photofabricate surface relief structures on azo polymer films. This newly developed process can be applied to various azobenzene polymers, including nonlinear optical polymers and conjugated polymers with important electronic and optical properties. The relief grating is the result of layer by layer plastic deformation of the polymer surface. Chromophore molecules in the viscous plasticized (by trans-cis-trans isomerization) surface layers are dragged by "optical tweezer" effects of the electric field gradient. Based on those investigations, possible mechanisms for the optical formation of the surface relief gratings are proposed. A number of device structures will be presented and the nature of optical storage and optical processing using these polymers and the novel photodynamic process will be discussed.