Oh noes... superconductive lies

[SiliconWizard]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2

[tooki]

Can you link to a copy that’s not behind a paywall?

[jmelson]

Just do a Google search on the guy's name Ranga Dias.  other pages with more info come up.
Jon

[SiliconWizard]

Just do a Google search on the guy's name Ranga Dias.  other pages with more info come up.
Jon

Yes - the info is easy to find elsewhere. Sorry for those that don't have a subscription to Nature, the reason I put this link is that I prefered giving an "official", credible link, rather than a random blog or second-zone newspaper that people could doubt.

It's pretty much all about the so-called "superconductivity at room temperature" afffair, that many of us had found fishy from the start.

Sabine Hossenfelder has made a video about it too, for those who want to have a look. (I'm not specifically "endorsing" her, so didn't put the video link either.)

[BrianHG]

[PlainName]

the reason I put this link is that I prefered giving an "official", credible link, rather than a random blog or second-zone newspaper that people could doubt

No problem. But perhaps you could add a quote or precis or executive summary so we have an idea of what it says? Why would one want to fail to pass a paywall, and then know what to search on and be bothered to try a search, and then to know what result is relevant to your opaque link?

If it isn't a secret or examination question, just tell us 

[switchabl]

It's mostly about how Dias pressured his grad students, tried to keep them out of the loop and ignored their concerns. When they finally figured out he had likely fabricated data and tried to get the paper retracted, he sent them a cease-and-desist letter. Sad but unfortunately not too surprising. Also questions about why Nature ignored his track record when they accepted another of his papers.

In case it's not obvious, this is completely unrelated to the social media craze around LK-99 last year. And AFAIK it has all been retracted already and in any case Dias' claims have been considered dodgy for a while now. So that part isn't exactly news.

[SiliconWizard]

The Nature article about the "scandal" is dated march 2024, so that was worth mentioning. Not sure many people knew about it. And unfortunately, no, it's not an isolated case and has become much too common in scientific research in the last decade.

As to LK-99, it's a different story and had also been settled: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2590238523005647
one may still argue about whether the team who published it initially was just "honestly misinterpreting" the results, or whether they were intentionally trying to deceive.

[switchabl]

I remember this being a pretty high-profile misconduct case last year, and considered questionable at least since the retraction of the 2020 article.

Unfortunately, a lot of the original stories are paywalled as well but Wikipedia has a summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranga_P._Dias#Scientific_misconduct_investigations

I suppose it might not have attracted much attention in the general media. This is still a niche topic. More so since, unlike with LK-99, supposed room-temperature T_c would only have been achieved under enormous pressure (>100 GPa). Conveniently, that also narrows down the number of labs with the capabilities to replicate the experiment a lot.

Setting aside the issue of (alleged) fraud, I don't think people realize how messy superconductor research is. There is a significant theory gap. Even the question of why existing "high" T_c work isn't really settled. In the end, experimentalists just have to throw stuff at the wall and hope something sticks. And often it's just someone working on synthesizing new materials looking into superconductivity as a side project. They won't necessarily be set up for this, measurements can be rudimentary, results not really conclusive. There have been many claimed break throughs that didn't hold up under scrutiny.

But then sometimes they do, so dimissing them out of hand is not an option either. Most famously, when Bednorz and Müller published their discovery of ceramic superconductors in 1986, all they had was DC resistance measurements on samples consisting of three different compounds and they didn't even know which one was supposed to be superconducting. They won a Nobel Prize just one year later. You can read the story in their Nobel lecture:
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/bednorz-muller-lecture-1.pdf

[raptor1956]

There has always been cheaters in science, it's a sad fact but a fact that must be challenged.  The fact that other scientists and labs test these ideas and either confirm or refute is how science works. 

Brian