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evilcam [soylentnews.org] writes:

Following a study published in October which claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor [aps.org], 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 [nature.com]:

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 20211, 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 [science.org] and a separate retraction of one of Dias’s papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September [nature.com]. (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 a story on Soylent earlier this week. [soylentnews.org]

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