'Something is seriously wrong': Room-temperature superconductivity study retracted

[Eugene]

Source: Science Magazine

‘Something is seriously wrong’: Room-temperature superconductivity study retracted

After doubts grew, blockbuster Nature paper is withdrawn over objections of study team

26 SEP 2022 11:00 AMBYERIC HAND

In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday the material would lead to variants that would enable lossless electricity grids and inexpensive magnets for MRI machines, maglev railways, atom smashers, and fusion reactors.

Faith in the result is now evaporating. On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data issues other scientists have raised over the past 2 years that have undermined confidence in one of two key signs of superconductivity Dias’s team had claimed. “There have been a lot of questions about this result for a while,” says James Hamlin, an experimental condensed matter physicist at the University of Florida. But Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and longtime critic of the study, says the retraction does not go far enough. He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct. “I think this is a real problem,” he says. “You cannot leave it as, ‘Oh, it’s a difference of opinion.’”

The retraction was unusual in that Nature editors took the step over the objection of all nine authors of the paper. “We stand by our work, and it’s been verified experimentally and theoretically,” Dias says. Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and another senior member of the collaboration, points out the retraction does not question the drop in electric resistance—the most important part of any superconductivity claim. He adds, “We’re confused and disappointed in the decision-making by the Nature editorial board.”

The retraction comes even as excitement builds for the class of superconducting materials called hydrides, which includes the carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) developed by Dias’s team. ...

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Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/something-seriously-wrong-room-temperature-superconductivity-study-retracted