The US “is a second-class, if not a third-class, citizen” in terms of investment in the synthesis of high-temperature superconductors, heavy-fermion materials, thin films, single crystals, ultra-pure semiconductors, and other specialized samples for condensed-matter experiments, says Cornell University's Séamus Davis. US scientists “have to go cap in hand to the people who lead the development of new materials in these research fields.” Davis gets samples for his spectroscopic imaging scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) studies from colleagues in Japan, Canada, and the UK. “From the pure perspective of science,” he says, “things are great. It's from the parochial perspective of how much belongs to the US that you may think there is a problem.”
With sample synthesis on the decline in the US over the past two decades or so, increasingly the US condensed-matter community does think there is a problem. Art Ramirez, director of device physics research at Bell Labs,...
