Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

After the global controversy over LK-99 came to an end, an information headline in Nature once again mentioned "room temperature superconductivity".

Although the enthusiasm for superconductivity has not diminished, as it has been falsified again and again, it is difficult not to be cautious about "room temperature superconductivity".

Nature's article uses the real experience of a researcher to analyze the reasons behind it.

The original title of this article, "Why room temperature superconductors are always questioned", seems to be a comment.

But in fact, the article is "storytelling", the protagonist is Ranga Dias, a physicist from the University of Rochester in the United States.

It was the scholar who announced the discovery of a new "room temperature superconductor" at the American physical Society meeting in March.

The Dias team claims that the material developed is a hydride called imino lutetium (LuNH), which is said to have superconducting properties at 1GPa, 21 degrees Celsius.

Unlike LK99, Dias's paper on LuNH has aroused massive skepticism after it was published.

The experiment failed and the author refused to disclose the details of the preparation of the product. Nature also added a note of "data in doubt" to it.

This is not the first time Dias's paper has been questioned. The team has previously released a hydride "room temperature superconductor" material, which ended up being withdrawn.

The fact that only one team reproduced the previous withdrawal experience of partial success may have deepened people's suspicions, but there are still a number of teams that have tried to replicate Dias's experiment.

But the results were not what Dias had hoped for-most of these repetition experiments ended in failure.

Two months after the release of the paper, the research group of Professor Wen Haihu of Nanjing University released a paper saying that LuNH did not show superconducting properties.

At the same time, many universities and research institutions at home and abroad have also carried out "anti-counterfeiting" on the "superconducting properties" of LuNH.

However, there is a team that claims to have successfully recreated the results of Dias, but the evidence seems to be insufficient.

A paper published by the Hemley team at the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that a change in the resistance of the LuNH was observed at about 3 ℃.

However, professionals say that the change in resistance alone is not enough to show that LuNH is superconducting, not to mention that there are only four data points in the paper.

Alexander Drozdov, a researcher at the Mapu Institute in Germany, said the result may be due to poor contact.

Dias explained that the teams "did not have enough samples and did not conduct enough tests", but Dias did not disclose the details of the test plan and sample preparation in detail.

Not only did the experiment fail, but LuNH was also questioned at the theoretical level.

Lilia Boeri, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the first University of Rome, told Nature that some researchers used computers to simulate the arrangement of a variety of Lu, N and H atoms, but failed to observe signs of room temperature superconductivity.

In addition to the content of the paper itself, the author's "criminal record" of Dias's "academic misconduct" may also be an important reason for his suspicion.

According to the website of Science magazine, Dias was accused this year of copying James Hamlin of Washington University in St. Louis for his doctoral thesis.

It is reported that at least 6300 words (about 21%) of Dias's paper are the same as Hamlin's paper.

In response, Dias said some of the content was "not clearly identified", but declined to comment further.

Dias is accused of academic misconduct, in addition to plagiarism and data fraud.

Among them is Dias's first published paper on room temperature superconductivity (which has been withdrawn) in 2020.

But after the withdrawal, the University of Rochester, where Dias is based, investigated the matter and found that "there is no evidence to support these concerns."

Coincidentally, another paper published by Dias in Physical Review Letters (PRL) has also been questioned for fraud.

The PRL commissioned four independent reviewers to investigate the matter, and the findings "convincingly support the allegations of data fabrication / falsification".

All the authors of the paper, except Dias himself, signed off, but Dias insisted that the results were fine.

It is not clear whether these academic scandals are real or hidden, but what is certain is that scientists are becoming more cautious about Dias research.

Reference link:

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02733-z

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegations-pursue-physicist-behind-stunning-superconductivity-claims

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