  Photonic crystals are extremely sensitive to structural disorder even to the
point of completely losing their functionalities. While on one side this can be
detrimental for applications in traditional optical devices, on the other side,
it gives also rise to very interesting new physics and maybe even new
applications. We propose a route to introduce disorder in photonic crystals in
a controlled way, by creating a certain percentage of vacancies in the lattice.
We show how the method works and what type of materials can be obtained this
way. Also we characterize the resulting transport properties from various
points of view, including measurements of the transport and scattering mean
free path and the diffusion constant.
