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

In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover.

“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.

The retraction was unusual in that Nature editors took the step over the objection of all nine authors of the paper.

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.

For the 2020 Nature paper, Dias and colleagues added carbon, crushed the mix in a diamond anvil cell, and heated it with a laser to create a new substance.

In response to some of the criticisms, Dias and Salamat in 2021 posted a paper to the arXiv physics preprint server.

“It raised more questions than it answered,” says Brad Ramshaw, a quantum materials physicist at Cornell University.

He says some of the published data presented by Dias and Salamat could be represented by a smooth polynomial curve—impossible for noisy laboratory measurements.

That study, which shared one author with the Nature paper, was retracted last year because of inaccurate magnetic susceptibility data.

This month, Hirsch and another critic, Dirk van der Marel, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Geneva, published their conclusion that the susceptibility data in the Dias study are “pathological.” Van der Marel is heartened by the Nature retraction.

Dias says the team plans to resubmit the paper to Nature without any background subtraction; he says the raw data alone show the change in magnetic susceptibility.

Eremets says the Dias study might still be right about CSH.