Templated organic and hybrid materials for optoelectronic applications

The review highlights different approaches to template organic materials as well as hybrid materials that find or are expected to find application in optoelectronic devices. The first templating approach focuses on the use of preformed nanoporous membranes as templates for organic materials and polymeric materials. Such nanoporous templates can be track-etched membranes, anodic aluminum oxide membranes and other variants thereof, or block copolymer templates. Further, opals have been described as templates. In the second part, we have summarized developments that take advantage of self-assembly processes to pattern hybrid materials. Examples are sol-gel templating techniques using amphiphiles, evaporation-induced self-assembly, lyotropic templating as well as templating from block copolymers. Both routes are very promising templating approaches for optoelectronic materials and represent complementary rather than competing techniques.