Composite materials of rare earth metals and polymers are a series of functional materials with many excellent properties and potential application. This review presents the research state over the decades on the preparation of polymers containing rare earth metals in doping-type and bonding-type

and its applications on the fields of optics

electricity

magnetic

catalysis

analysis

etc

. The rare earth compounds were uniformly dispersed into monomers and polymers as dopant in doping type rare earth polymer

while the bonding type rare earth polymers could be synthesized by the following three approaches:In the first approach

lanthanide ions were incorporated with the reactive functional groups such as hydroxyl and carboxyl in the polymer side chains; The second one is that lanthanide ions were coordinated with polymer dentate ligands such as β-diketonates

carboxyl

pyridine

porphyrin and sulfo group; The third one is homopolymerization and copolymerization of the monomers containing lanthanide ions. In addition

some research results in our groups on the synthesis and properties of optical resins containing rare earth compounds were summarized. In our recent work

some binary and ternary rare earth complexes were dispersed into the styrene/methylacrylic acid copolymerization system

and the optical resins possess a high transparency

intense luminescent properties and good mechanical properties were obtained.