Light-based technology is all around us. It offers massive opportunity, and it is core to global economic growth.
From the solar panels heating your shower this morning, to the display on your phone and the immersive game you played over fibre broadband after your hospital scan, light-based technologies powered your day. Perhaps the easiest way to understand photonic technologies, is to think about a life without them.
Behind medical imaging, robotic sensing, smart phones and augmented or virtual reality sits a photonics core components industry.
This industry uses crystals, glasses, optical fibre and semiconductor substrates to manufacture lasers, displays and photonic integrated circuits. These are used to develop scanners, computers and sensors, often connected to the internet over optical fibre or satellite. According to SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the annual value of photonics enabled services worldwide exceeded US$16 trillion in 2024. Our Beacons programme explores the properties of photonic and quantum technologies.
Quantum technologies exploit the properties identified by quantum physics (superposition and entanglement) to provide new capabilities in computing, simulation, communications and sensing. Many quantum technologies are built from and underpinned by advanced photonics. The Quantum Technologies Aotearoa programme is focused on this domain.
Governments around the world are spending billions to maintain a competitive edge in this arena. Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre is New Zealand’s Centre of Research Excellence in the field and is recognised globally for the study of quantum optics, photonics, and ultra-cold atoms.
Te Whai Ao Rōpū Māori, develops and recommends strategies to create opportunities for all members.
We focus on Māori and Pacific research opportunities to create cutting-edge research at the interface of mātauranga Māori and science. We also focus on building capacity of researchers and the Māori and Pacific organisations with which we engage.
This strategy is delivered across the Centre’s research programme, and through partnerships with schools and universities, including the Māngere College Undergraduate Scholarship, Hands on Otago, and Science Wānanga.
We reach 8,000+ individuals each year, generating engagement with STEM.
Our outstanding engagement programme is unique in its emphasis on whānaukataka (belonging) through face-to-face, interactive content delivered to communities across Aotearoa to not only provide communities with access to learning resources but with access to our researchers and their mahi (work).
Our outstanding educational engagement programmes, delivered in partnership with museums, schools and key stakeholders, ensure the benefits of a high-quality Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education are open to all.
Te Whai Ao —Dodd-Walls Centre engages with companies across the photonics and quantum technologies industry to help grow New Zealand’s economy.
The Australasian photonic and quantum technologies industry was valued at AU$6bn in 2024. Multiple sectors are enabled by photonics, including quantum technologies which themselves include computing, simulation, communications, precision measurement and sensing.
At Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre we count our graduates among our greatest successes.
All students undertake research, most of them at PhD level. Many go on to employment in New Zealand or find jobs overseas.
We produce around 200 peer-reviewed publications each year, appearing in journals such as Nature, IEEE, Optica, Advanced Science, Physical Review and Superconductor Science & Technology.
The Dodd-Walls Centre research focus is photonics, the generation, transmission, and manipulation of light, and the study of matter and energy at the quantum level.