A fabrication method and materials produce high quality aperiodic photonic structures. Light emission can be activated by thermal annealing post growth treatments when thin film layers of SiO.sub.2 and SiN.sub.x or Si-rich oxide are used. From these aperiodic structures, that can be obtained in different vertical and planar device geometries, the presence of aperiodic order in a photonic device provides strong group velocity reduction (slow photons), enhanced light-matter interaction, light emission enhancement, gain enhancement, and/or nonlinear optical properties enhancement.