New Superconductor Scandal: What We Know So Far
Image: Pongkaew via Wikimedia Commons
Remember last year’s superconductor news? Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester in New York claimed he had found a material that was superconducting at room temperature, though he had to put it under pressure. Well, it now looks like not only is the stuff not superconducting, but that it wasn’t an accidentally deception, it was a deliberate one. And some people from his lab have now spoken out. Let’s have a look.
This is not the story of LK99 the floating Korean miracle crumbles. Those turned out to not be superconducting but to me it looks like an honest mistake.
No, this is the story of Ranga Dias who made big headlines last year by claiming to have a room temperature superconductor that works at 10000 bar, that is 10000 times atmospheric pressure, which some outlets cheerfully reported as “moderate pressure”. To me 10000 bar seems like a lot of pressure, but maybe it’s normal in New York, what do I know. To be fair though, this pressure is much easier to reach than the low temperatures that the already know superconductors need. And if Dias had been right that would have been a big deal indeed.
A superconductor is a material without electric resistance. If we had a material that was superconducting in an everyday environment that’d be big because it could dramatically improve the efficiency of the entire electric grid and other electric devices.
But when the news broke, Dias already had somewhat of a reputation. Three years earlier, a team also led by Dias published a paper, also in Nature, about a supposed superconductor breakthrough. The paper was retracted two years later after other scientists raised doubts about the data analysis.
When Dias lab came out with the new supposed discovery, many of his colleagues were highly sceptical.
The biggest issue with the paper was the graph that shows the drop of the resistivity to zero, which is the hallmark of superconductivity. This graph relied on a noise subtraction that might have subtracted a bit too much. Within a matter of days, several people pointed out that, without this noise subtraction, the neat drop of the resistivity disappeared.
This discussion drew attention to another paper he had published earlier in PRL and which was then also retracted due to data anomalies. Some raised allegations that Dias plagiarized parts of his PhD thesis.
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