The availability of resources needed to develop the next generation of materials is not guaranteed, particularly in the US, which is also facing growing competition from overseas. That is according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which calls on US government agencies to upgrade or replace key infrastructure as well as develop a national strategy to bring together research teams from academia, government and industry.
Commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy, the report — Frontiers of Materials Research: A Decadal Survey — builds on two previous decadal surveys of the field that were published in 1990 and 2010. The latest report identifies several areas that are “critical” to the field, including computational materials science and engineering as well as digital manufacturing and materials for quantum information science. It also finds that bringing together computational methods with materials characterization and synthesis is accelerating the discovery of designer materials and their use in products.
We were really struck by how broad and deep this field is
Laura Greene
According to the report, that accelerating growth promises “enormous potential for impacting the quality and sustainability of Earth’s environment” — for example, the design of new materials to catalyse a range of important chemical reactions. Further research, the report continues, “could certainly improve sustainable manufacturing of materials – for example, choice of raw materials, energy-efficient manufacturing methods, and recyclability”. As for basic research, the panel cites work on the fundamental understanding of metals and alloys, including nanostructured metallic alloys, two-dimensional materials, composite materials and metamaterials.
“We were really struck by how broad and deep this field is, how quickly it’s evolving and how many, many methods have really played a major change in the way materials research is done,” says physicist Laura Greene from Florida State University, who is one of three co-chairs of the committee that prepared the report. “We’re feeling it’s growing more quickly as time moves on.”
Making the case
The panel calls for continued government support of facilities that are key to materials-science research. These include the Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Synchrotron Light Source II and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
“We make a case for improving large physics facilities to keep improving synchrotron activities, X-ray activities, and others that have to do with manufacturing methods,” says panel co-chair Matthew Tirrell, who is director of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and chief research officer at Argonne National Laboratory. Why solid-state physics is like a Star Wars plot
The report also points to the need for close collaboration between universities, government laboratories and industry — as well as between scientific fields and different types of research institution. “The willingness to talk across fields all the way to industrial application seems much higher than in the past,” says Tom Lubensky, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania and also a co-chair of the panel.
To build on that willingness, the panel recommends that the NSF should develop a new type of centre to “enable and indeed stimulate, students, faculty, and industrial scientists and engineers to work side by side”. It also calls for the US government to start assessing the threat of worldwide competition for resources next year and to define a strategy “to combat this threat” by 2022.
