Researchers worry the controversy is damaging the field's reputation:
Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.
The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper". (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)
It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.
[...] This year's report by Dias and Salamat is the second significant claim of superconductivity to crash and burn in 2023. In July, a separate team at a start-up company in Seoul described a crystalline purple material dubbed LK-99 — made of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — that they said showed superconductivity at normal pressures and at temperatures up to at least 127 °C (400 kelvin). There was much online excitement and many attempts to reproduce the results, but researchers quickly reached a consensus that the material was not a superconductor at all.
[...] Canfield says that the Dias–Salamat collaboration has spread a "foul vapour" over the field, which "is scaring young researchers and funding agencies away".
"I have some colleagues who simply are afraid that this case of Dias puts a shadow of doubt on the credibility of our field in general," Eremets says.
Ho-Kwang Mao, director of the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing, is more sanguine. "I do not think it will affect the funding for superconductivity research other than more careful reviews, which is not necessarily bad," he says.
[...] "Serious people continue to do amazing and interesting work," Armitage says. "Sure, they can be disheartened by this nonsense, but it won't stop the science."
No, this is not a dupe. That story from a few months ago was about a different Dias superconductivity paper that was retracted. No, not that other one either.
Related Stories
cracks diamonds
Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time:
A team of physicists in New York has discovered a material that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at room temperature — a long-sought scientific milestone. The hydrogen, carbon and sulfur compound operates as a superconductor at up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the team reported today in Nature. That's more than 50 degrees hotter than the previous high-temperature superconductivity record set last year.
"This is the first time we can really claim that room-temperature superconductivity has been found," said Ion Errea, a condensed matter theorist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was not involved in the work.
"It's clearly a landmark," said Chris Pickard, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge. "That's a chilly room, maybe a British Victorian cottage," he said of the 59-degree temperature.
Yet while researchers celebrate the achievement, they stress that the newfound compound — created by a team led by Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester — will never find its way into lossless power lines, frictionless high-speed trains, or any of the revolutionary technologies that could become ubiquitous if the fragile quantum effect underlying superconductivity could be maintained in truly ambient conditions. That's because the substance superconducts at room temperature only while being crushed between a pair of diamonds to pressures roughly 75% as extreme as those found in the Earth's core.
"People have talked about room-temperature superconductivity forever," Pickard said. "They may not have quite appreciated that when we did it, we were going to do it at such high pressures."
Materials scientists now face the challenge of discovering a superconductor that operates not only at normal temperatures but under everyday pressures, too. Certain features of the new compound raise hopes that the right blend of atoms could someday be found.
Journal Reference:
Chris J. Pickard, Ion Errea, and Mikhail I. Eremets, Superconducting Hydrides Under Pressure, Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031218-013413)
Following a study published in October which claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor, the academics that wrote and co-wrote the paper have been accused of falsifying their data, as well as attempting to cover up their deception.
From Nature:
A prominent journal has decided to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors — materials that would not require any cooling to conduct electricity with zero resistance. The forthcoming retraction, of a paper published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) in 2021, is significant because the Nature news team has learnt that it is the result of an investigation that found apparent data fabrication. PRL's decision follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias's papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September. (Nature's news team is independent of its journals team.)
As part of the investigation, co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a long-time collaborator of Dias, supplied what he claimed was raw data used to create figures in the PRL paper. But all four investigators found that the data Salamat provided did not match the figures in the paper. Two of the referees wrote in their report that, the conclusions of their investigation "paint a very disturbing picture of apparent data fabrication followed by an attempt to hide or coverup [sic] the fact. We urge immediate retraction of the paper".
Note this is not related to an earlier Soylent story.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 11 2023, @10:18PM
This Dias person sounds like a fraud through and through. It's alleged he even plagiarized his PhD thesis. If so, of course he'd keep on cheating. He can't be completely fake, he has to know enough to pass his fakery off as genuine. If such a person manages to stay obscure their entire career, carefully limiting their fake findings to trivial matters, they might manage to make it to retirement without being found out. But I doubt it. That tactic runs into the problem of not being satisfying, not being enough to keep that academic and research position. They have to do more. But, soon as any such person claims something extraordinary enough to get a lot of attention, they've doomed themselves. Others will try to replicate the results, and find that they cannot. With additional bull and gaslighting and smokescreening that the scientists trying to replicate the results didn't do it right or some other difficult to follow thing, the others can be fooled, for an even shorter time. Or the cheater may try to claim it was all an honest mistake, and be found to be lying about that too. Impossible to convince anyone it was honest when it is found that data and graphs and such like have been doctored.
What's really sad is that it takes a lot of hard work and good thinking to get a PhD. He cannot have leaned on cheating all the way. How the heck can anyone cheat their way past the orals? Only way I can think to pull that off is by suborning the professors or the school so that they give him a pass even though the professors know he did not pass, and if that was done, they'd have to keep a lid on it forever after. The cheater would make that more difficult by frequently giving himself away, inadvertently revealing that he doesn't know his stuff as well as he should, were he doing honest studies. So I guess Dias did have the chops to pass the orals honestly, if barely. Not impossible that it was only later, perhaps under the pressure of "publish or perish", that he turned to cheating, but I suspect a careful examination of his past would turn up other instances of academic fraud.
Scientists often face this dilemma. Suppose you're the scientist in this position in which supporters are demanding more than you can do, maybe more than anyone can do. No one knows if what they're asking is possible or not. Determining that is made much harder by the presence of some incoherence in their demands. They're not scientists. And they may harbor some resentment of scientists. What do you do? They will not listen to protestations that they're expecting too much, instead threatening to fire you if you don't somehow perform. You could end up in a position in which no matter what you do, your career is ruined. Cheat, and it will be found out. Or don't cheat, and be accused of of all kinds of things of which incompetence is the least of them. You could be accused of laziness and even treachery, and fired in a very demeaning and humiliating way. Those kind of dirtbag bosses don't really give a crap about the damage to your reputation, they care only to cover their own behinds. Yeah, some would ruin others' careers rather than admit they were wrong about even a minor thing. It can be very hard, but the honest thing to do in such an unfair situation is still the best thing to do. Sure, one would like to know that the bosses at that particular organization are unreasonable before hiring on, but that's not so easily determined. So, keep a line of retreat open so you can quit if you learn that's how the management rolls. Don't fall for their exhortations to "show commitment" and "team spirit" by rigging your finances so that your life blows up the moment you lose the income from that job. Indeed, if they are making such exhortations, that's a sign that they don't play fair and you should consider getting out. One other nasty financial trick they like to pull is language in the employment contract that says if you don't stay for at least a year, you have to return the money they gave you to cover moving expenses.