ABSTRACT
Self-assembly techniques have been widely used to grow ordered structures such as opal-based photonic crystals. Such structures consist of periodic arrangements of, usually spherical, building blocks, which, in the ideal case, are identical to each other. In practice, this often means the use of monodisperse spheres. Alternatively, one can also construct disordered congurations of identical building blocks, which by analogy can be termed photonic glasses.1
