Similar to the Material Genome Initiative (https://www.mgi.gov/) this FET ProActive call would allow a multi- and inter-disciplinary effort in order to develop new materials aimed at specific tasks. Such interdisciplinary efforts from chemists, physicists and engineers on a long term basis might bring to light a new material that would allow many fold enhancement of current devices performance.

It would allow for a complete change in perspective of how we deal with materials. As such, rather than trying to do the best with the available materials, such a call would aim at allowing the development of custom-made materials for the purpose.

One example would be low-loss propagation of plasmons and, as such, allow the possible implementation of this research field into everyday life. The plasmonic research field deals with the use of free electrons in controlling the light behaviour. It is considered a possible alternative for on-chip optical interconnects and processing, among others. Most of the experiments in this field are aimed at metals but new materials, like transparent conductive oxides are on the rise. The main bottleneck in obtaining devices that are capable of entering the mass-production cycle is the difficulty of overcoming the material losses. Theoretical works showing a much better behaviour of devices having lower material loss are presented in [X. Sun, L. Wosinski, L. Thylen, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 22/2, p. 1-6, 2016] and a strong case towards finding such materials is made.

Initial theoretical works [J. B. Khurgin and G. Sun, Appl. Phys. Lett., 96/18, p. 181102, 2010] show that one could engineer a new material that would provide low loss but still metallic characteristics in the near IR range. Still, from these initial works to a real material, there is a huge gap and a FET call addressing, among others, such a challenge would be beneficial. It wold allow for research teams with various backgrounds to join forces and develop an industrially viable material that not only would allow for low loss propagation and, as such, better devices but also potentially decrease the manufacturing costs of such devices.

We should mention here also the various works in testing new materials that might have better characteristics [P. R. West, S. Ishii, G. V. Naik, N. K. Emani, V. M. Shalaev, and A. Boltasseva, Laser & Photonics Reviews, 4/6, p. 795–808, 2010]. Still, these materials show their best in mid-infrared range while for application involving telecomunnications and on-chip processing, near infrared ranges are much more developed and preffered.

Other areas where this call would be beneficial include fuel cell technologies, photovoltaic cells, materials with specific mechanical properties and superconductive alloys among others.