Tailored disorder—materials design for advanced photonic applications: introduction

Tailored disorder represents an emerging design concept that explores the photonic properties of material composites with deliberately introduced irregularities in their geometry and composition. This rapidly developing field of cutting-edge research addresses various aspects from fundamental scientific questions to various subfields of material science required for technological implementations of optimized material applications. The combination of inspiration from biological systems, results from physics, chemical derivatization approaches, and validation from simulation, together with innovative material science and engineering approaches, enables a new design framework for advanced photonic materials with interesting properties. This finally leads to novel custom-made devices for a variety of photonic applications, their performance being related to the tailored disorder within three-dimensional micro- and nanoarchitectures. This feature issue presents most recent and selected developments in the field.