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A outstanding journal has resolved to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the College of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about identifying space-temperature superconductors — elements that would not have to have any cooling to carry out electrical energy with zero resistance. The forthcoming retraction, of a paper printed by Bodily Evaluation Letters (PRL) in 2021, is considerable since the Mother nature news staff has learnt that it is the end result of an investigation that identified obvious info fabrication.
PRL’s selection follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias’s papers on area-temperature superconductivity by Mother nature last September. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journals crew.)
Immediately after acquiring an e-mail final 12 months expressing concern about probable details fabrication in Dias’s PRL paper — a review, not about home-temperature superconductivity, but about the electrical houses of manganese disulfide (MnS2) — the journal commissioned an investigation by four impartial referees. Character’s news staff has received documents about the investigation, including e-mails and 3 reports of its end result, from resources who have asked to continue being anonymous. “The results back again up the allegations of data fabrication/falsification convincingly,” PRL’s editors wrote in an e-mail received by Mother nature. Jessica Thomas, an government editor at the American Bodily Culture, which publishes PRL, declined to comment.
As portion of the investigation, co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a extensive-time collaborator of Dias, equipped what he claimed was raw knowledge made use of to make figures in the PRL paper. But all 4 investigators observed that the details Salamat furnished did not match the figures in the paper. Two of the referees wrote in their report that, the conclusions of their investigation “paint a extremely disturbing image of apparent facts fabrication followed by an attempt to conceal or coverup [sic] the point. We urge speedy retraction of the paper”.
Files demonstrate that PRL agreed with the findings of the investigation, describing Salamat’s submission of “so-called raw data” as “what appears to be a deliberate endeavor to obstruct the investigation”.
Salamat did not respond to numerous requests from Character for comment by the time this story printed. Dias responded to Mother nature’s requests for remark in a assertion despatched by a spokesperson. In it, he denies any misconduct and tends to make very clear his commitment to room-temperature superconductivity research. “We remain particular that there has been no information fabrication, details manipulation or any other scientific misconduct in connection with our function,” the assertion claims. “Despite this setback, we continue being enthusiastic about continuing our do the job.”
Heated debate
When Dias and his collaborators published a paper in Character in October 2020 reporting that they had created a superconductor that labored at about 15 ºC below severe tension larger than one particular million atmospheres, they quickly built headlines. Most superconductors operate only at frigid temperatures down below 200 kelvin (−73.15 ºC). Other researchers could not reproduce the success, and final calendar year, Character retracted the article. The retraction did not point out misconduct. Karl Ziemelis, chief actual physical sciences editor at the journal, points out that “data-processing irregularities” were being found out as a result of an investigation. “We misplaced assurance in the paper as a complete and duly retracted it. Our broader investigation of that perform ceased at that issue,” he claims.
Earlier this 12 months, Dias and his colleagues created an even a lot more spectacular assert, as soon as yet again in Character: a new product manufactured of lutetium, hydrogen and nitrogen (Lu-H-N) could keep superconducting at space temperature and rather minimal pressures. Acquiring a content that is a superconductor below ambient ailments has prolonged been a intention of physicists: purposes of an ambient superconductor contain electrical power-effective computer chips and effective magnets for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. But due to the fact of the 2022 Nature retraction — and now the impending a person in PRL — many physicists have been eyeing the Lu-H-N outcomes with suspicion way too.
Peter Armitage, a physicist at Johns Hopkins College in Baltimore, Maryland, who has been monitoring the controversy, states: “I just simply cannot see how we can have confidence in just about anything [from Dias and Salamat] at this place.”
Questioned about community have confidence in in Dias’s analysis posted by Character, Ziemelis points out that each and every manuscript is evaluated independently, suggesting that the 2022 retraction had no bearing on the thing to consider of the paper printed this year. “Our editors make choices [about accepting manuscripts] dependent solely on regardless of whether exploration meets our standards for publication,” he claims. “If worries are raised with us, we will constantly look into them diligently.”
Allegations emerge
Troubles with details in the 2021 PRL paper came to light-weight late final year mainly because James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, had seen that textual content from his have 2007 PhD thesis appeared in Dias’s 2013 thesis. This prompted Hamlin to carefully look at Dias’s perform.
Scrolling as a result of figures from Dias’s thesis, and comparing them with figures in modern papers by Dias, Hamlin noticed that a plot of the electrical resistance for the substance germanium tetraselenide (GeSe4), reviewed in Dias’s thesis, closely matched a plot of the resistance for MnS2, presented in the PRL paper. Both plots experienced an extremely similar curve, specifically at minimal temperatures, he suggests (see ‘Odd similarity’). “It just seemed extremely challenging to picture that this could all be a coincidence.”

On 27 October 2022, Hamlin passed his worries to PRL and all the authors of the paper. A single of them, Simon Kimber, a physicist then at the University of Burgundy Franche-Comté in France, was straight away worried and requested a retraction. “The instant I observed the comment, I understood a thing was wrong,” Kimber told Mother nature. “There is no bodily clarification for the similarities among the information sets.” None of the other authors, in addition to Dias, responded to Nature’s requests for remark.
PRL asked the authors for a reaction to the fears Hamlin had pointed out. Documents Character obtained explain what took place next. On 24 February this yr, Salamat replied, defending the integrity of the info and claiming that other components also exhibited very similar behaviour. Kimber was unconvinced, however, and on 5 March, he wrote a reply to Salamat, noting that one particular element in the GeSe4 plot, a dip in electrical resistance all-around 45 kelvin, appeared to be the consequence of a measurement glitch. The identical dip appeared in the MnS2 plot, which really should be impossible if the two have been knowledge from separate measurements.
Days later on, PRL verified it was investigating the paper, and on 20 March, used an ‘expression of concern’ to it online.
Investigating the info
Just after analysing the information, two of the 4 investigating referees concluded that the “only rationalization of the similarity” in the GeSe4 and MnS2 plots is that knowledge were being taken from Dias’s 2013 thesis and made use of in the 2021 PRL paper. A different of the referees bolstered this summary in their have report by demonstrating how the alleged fabrication could have transpired: the referee uncovered a simple mathematical function that could be utilized to the GeSe4 data to map it onto the MnS2 data (see ‘Curve matching’).

Mother nature discovered the identification of this nameless referee, and reached out to them. “When you really see the near arrangement in between the transformed GeSe4 dataset and the purported MnS2 data, it appears to be extremely not likely that this could be coincidental,” the referee told Nature.
For David Muller, a physicist at Cornell College in Ithaca, New York, the circumstances bordering Dias’s retractions and thesis reminds him of a sequence of retractions designed two a long time back, immediately after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was identified to have falsified facts. In Schön’s circumstance, and in his have knowledge, Muller says, “people who phony details are likely not to do it just once”.
Disclosure: The creator of this tale is connected to Robert Garisto, the managing editor of PRL. The two have experienced no call about this story. Paperwork attained by Nature show that Samindranath Mitra was the performing managing editor for PRL’s investigation.
This post is reproduced with permission and was initial posted on July 25, 2023.
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