Stunning room-temperature-superconductor claim is retracted - Nature.com

A magnet levitating over a cryogenically cooled superconductor (artist’s concept).Credit: KTSDesign/Science Photo Library.

A high-profile study in which researchers claimed to have observed the first true room-temperature superconductor has been retracted.

Physicist Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York State and his collaborators stirred interest but also caution with a 2020 Nature paper1 that reported the creation of a superconductor that worked at an unprecedented temperature of 15 ˚C.

Only in recent years have physicists managed to get some to work above 0 ˚C using high-pressure anvils.

Dias’s team “used a non-standard, user-defined procedure” in subtracting noise from experimental data shown in two figures, according to the retraction notice published2 on 26 September.

They will resubmit the paper to Nature with the raw-data plots of the figures.

The retraction follows the publication in Nature of a response4 to the original paper by physicists Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego, and Frank Marsiglio at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

The two had raised multiple questions about the study, in particular regarding the two figures mentioned in the retraction notice.

Several other publications had also questioned the claim, as did other physicists who pointed out some of these same issues in interviews with Nature’s news team at the time of the original publication.

“The retraction is dramatic but the correct decision,” says Mikhail Eremets, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, of the retraction.

Nature 586, 373–377 (2020)E

Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05294-9 (2022).

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The University of Chicago (UChicago)

Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Tulane University

Arizona State University (ASU)

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