In August, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, announced they had engineered three-dimensional "metamaterials" which could reverse the direction of visible and near-infrared light.
Such moves could pave the way for nanocircuits for high-powered computers and cloaking devices to render objects invisible to the human eye, commentators said.
"It's certainly a very exciting field," Mr Haines said yesterday.
The Woolf Fisher scholarship, believed to be the most lucrative New Zealand-sourced award for overseas study, provides about NZ$100,000 a year to support study at Oxford University or Cambridge University, in England.
Advances in metamaterials research would ultimately bring many benefits, including economic gains for this country from the commercialisation of further research in the field by New Zealand scientists, Mr Haines said.
Three Woolf Fisher scholarships are awarded each year. Chemistry students at Otago won two of them last year.
Mr Haines (21), a final year BSc (Hons) student in physics and mathematics, said the scholarship provided "an incredible amount of money" and also meant certainty about his plans for next year.
He hopes to study for a doctorate of philosophy, investigating the assembly of metamaterials, in the NanoPhotonics group at Cambridge University from October next year.