Nature magazine has retracted a paper that claimed the discovery of a superconductor capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure, after it was asked to do so by eight of the 11 co-authors.
“They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied,” said the retraction notice.
The authors have concluded “that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper,” it added.
The move comes after Nature in March published a paper created by controversial physicist Ranga Dias and his team that claimed to have identified a room-temperature superconductor, a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance. If accurate, the discovery was expected to make energy grids and other electrical systems work far more efficiently.
But Dias, who has been accused of fabricating data and plagiarizing parts of his Ph.D thesis, immediately ran into resistance from other physicists who questioned the data and claims.
That led Nature in September to launch a review of the paper, which culminated in Tuesday’s retraction.
The paper claimed that the rare-earth metal lutetium combined with nitrogen and hydrogen was a superconductor at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That was revolutionary because it usually requires ultralow temperatures and high pressure to exhibit superconducting.
The team called the material “reddmatter,” a reference to a substance in the 2009 “Star Trek” move that was meant to form black holes.
Nature said it was the third high-profile retraction of papers by Dias, who is at the University of Rochester in New York, and co-author Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Nature retracted a 2020 paper from Dias that claimed superconductivity in another material after physicists questioned the data.
In July, the journal Physical Review Letters told Dias and his co-authors they were retracting a paper from 2021 after an internal review found that data had been fabricated.
Dias has objected to all three of the retractions. Salamat approved the two this year, said Nature.
“It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted,” Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory, told Nature.
Dias and Salamat did not respond to a request for comment by Nature’s news team.
The March paper is the second major claim around superconductivity to burn out this year, according to Nature. In July, a team at a startup in Seoul described ” crystalline purple material dubbed LK-99—made of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen—that they said showed superconductivity at normal pressures and at temperatures up to at least 127 °C (400 Kelvin),” said Nature.
There was much excitement about that claim until efforts to reproduce the results failed.
The University of Rochester is now conducting its own investigation of Dias’ work.
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