2023-09-04 17:45:04
The year 2023 will remain marked with a white stone in the history of superconductivity, because it is not only the South Korean material that is making headlines. Another, forged in the United States, warms the spirits just as much. Few believe in the solidity of the result. Suspicions of dishonesty even hover, since the main co-author, Ranga Dias, professor at the University of Rochester (State of New York), has already two articles withdrawn from the literature for doubts about his data. He is also accused of plagiarism in his thesis.
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March 8, this American team is therefore causing a stir in the review Nature. It has manufactured a superconducting material as soon as the temperature drops below 21°C only, but under high pressure, ten thousand times atmospheric pressure. Which is still two hundred times lower than the then record.
Questions about the quality of the results immediately arise and several teams have replicated the experiment without success. The latest, Chinese, posted its negative findings on July 1 on the preprint site Arxiv.org, explaining that the strength of the material drops but remains non-zero. Alone another American team was able to test a sample from Rochester and perform electrical measurements consistent with those published. “We cannot say that it is a replication because the sample is very dirty and inhomogeneous. There is also a lack of magnetic measurements”recalls Hai-Hu Wen, co-author of one of the negative studies at Nanjing University (Chine). “It’s in progress”says Russell Hemley, professor at the University of Illinois, responsible for these experiments and former co-author of Ranga Dias.
“Apparent fabrication of data”
But an accumulation of elements came to undermine a little more confidence in the result of Rochester. Latest: September 1, the magazine Nature posted an alert on the March 8 article page stating that “The reliability of the data is questioned. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this issue is resolved.”.
American physicist Ranga Dias, in a laboratory at the University of Rochester (State of New York), March 2, 2022. LAUREN PETRACCA / NYT-REDUX-REA
On August 15, this kind of alert led to the retraction ofa previous article signed by Ranga Dias, published in Physical Review Letters in 2021. The review had mobilized four experts, as the American journalist Daniel Garisto revealed in Nature from July 25. Their reports, that The world was able to consult, are devastating. All explain that the data provided, supposed to come from experience, does not reproduce the published curves! Worse, they confirm that these curves are partly the decals of those previously published on another material and with different pressures.
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