Superconductor Scientist Faces Investigation as Paper is Recalled

Why It Matters: Recurring questions about the claims of blockbuster physics.

A superconductor is a material that effortlessly carries electrical current. If such a substance works at everyday temperatures, it could find use in power transmission lines, MRI machines, and just about any device that uses electricity. Today’s superconductors must be cooled to temperatures that limit their usefulness.

In the last weeks, euphoria by LK-99a different material that scientists in South Korea say is a superconductor at room temperature has spread on social media, though much of that excitement has died down after other scientists failed to confirm the superconductivity observations and proposed alternative explanations. plausible.

However, the fundamental laws of physics do not prohibit the possibility of a superconductor at room temperature, and the search for such materials will continue.

Background: Another unverified room-temperature superconductor.

in march in an article published in the journal NatureDr. Dias and his collaborators said they had discovered a material that is superconducting at temperatures up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, even though it required squeezing at a pressure of 145,000 pounds per square inch.

Many other scientists received the announcement with skepticism because an earlier Nature article by Dr. Dias described a different and less practical superconducting material it had already been retracted.

Questions have also been raised about the now-retired Physical Review Letters article. James Hamlin, a professor of physics at the University of Florida, told the journal’s editors that the curves in one of the paper’s figures depicting electrical resistance in the chemical compound manganese sulfide resembled those in the doctoral thesis. of Dr. Dias that described the behavior of a different material.

The magazine recruited outside experts who produced three independent reports to review the figure and the underlying data. “The findings convincingly support the allegations of data fabrication/falsification,” the journal’s editors wrote in an email to the paper’s authors on July 10.

Dr. Dias’s latest response is “both inadequate and disappointing,” said one of the reviewers, who asked to remain anonymous because the reviewers have not been publicly identified.

The reviewer said that in the months of back and forth between the paper’s authors, Dr. Hamlin, and the editors of Physical Review Letters that were shared with the reviewers, there was no mention of Adobe Illustrator or what Dr. Dias said. a better graph that was generated by his lab in December 2019.

Both the University of Rochester and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas should conduct open and transparent investigations into “what appears to be possible malfeasance,” the reviewer said.

Dr. Salamat and Keith V. Lawler, a research professor at UNLV and another key author of the manganese sulfide paper, did not respond to requests for comment.

What’s next: an investigation and a response.

The University of Rochester “is conducting a thorough investigation into the questions raised about the integrity of all the data at issue in this and other studies,” a university spokeswoman said in an email.

The university had previously conducted two preliminary investigations into Dr. Dias’ research and decided that the concerns did not warrant further scrutiny. This time, the university decided to start an investigation, the next step mandated by its policy on research misconduct.

The university does not plan to make the results of the investigation public, the spokeswoman said.

On Tuesday, Dr. Hamlin said he was pleased the journal had taken his concerns seriously. He said there were two additional instances of apparent duplication of data in Dr. Dias’s work that he hoped would also be reviewed. one implies a paper in Scientific Reports magazine; the other is what Dr. Hamlin describes as a duplication of data in Dr. Dias’s thesis.