In my lab its just another day at the office and with my suppliers and budget its boring COTS. To work with substance X, which is called "exotic", you need an

In my lab its just another day at the office and with my suppliers and budget its boring COTS. To work with substance X, which is called "exotic", you need an upgrade beyond my lab's equipment and safety gear and training, my suppliers consider it custom work if they can provide at all, and the budget has another couple zeros. More simply, its politely described as "exotic" if you go to a conference and talk about it and people are jealous of your gear / skills / budget / risk taking. An electronics analogy is a dude who can't solder at all thinks thru-hole soldering is exotic skills and equipment. A dude good at thru-hole thinks SMD is exotic. A dude with good SMD ability thinks owning your own bare die wire-bonder is exotic. A dude with great wire-bond ability thinks working at a foundry and designing custom monolithic microwave chips is exotic. I have no idea what a custom microwave chip designer would think is exotic, probably some Area 51 stuff involving UFOs, realistically maybe working as a physical chemist or as an experimental semiconductor physicist. Those guys probably think super colliders and warp drives and fusion reactors are exotic, I donno.