The photonic crystals developed by Dawes can include rare earth ion optical emitters and nanodiamonds that include colour centres. In general, Dawes creates the opals using self-assembly, starting with a suspension of polystyrene or microsphere of silica. It is important that the silica microspheres are monodisperse, and this is achieved during the Stober synthesis. To make inverse opals, Dawes creates polystyrene opals, and then infiltrates them using silica sol-gel. The remaining structures are baked at high temperatures to remove traces of polystyrene. By coating the microsphere with a high refractive index material life silver, and allowing the coated spheres to self-assemble into an opal, makes it possible to generate a complete band gap opal. To establish the impact of periodic environments on the emission profiles of nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds, Dawes deposited them on the surfaces of her fabricated opals. Placing them in these periodic environments, or doping the opals with nanodiamonds, decreases the lifetime of the emitting species until they became single-photon sources. She found that lifetime variance is reduced for nitrogen-vacancy centers, which is not related to the size of the nanodiamond particles. The lifetime of these species appears to depend on the curvature of the substrate.