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Ranga Dias, the physicist on the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, dedicated knowledge fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, in accordance with a investigation commissioned by his college. Nature’s information staff found the bombshell investigation report in court docket paperwork.
The ten-month investigation, which concluded on 8 February, was carried out by an unbiased group of scientists recruited by the College of Rochester in New York. They examined 16 allegations in opposition to Dias and concluded that it was extra possible than not that in every case, the physicist had dedicated scientific misconduct. The college is now trying to fireplace Dias, who’s a tenure-track college member at Rochester, earlier than his contract expires on the finish of the 2024–25 educational 12 months.
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The investigation report (see Supplementary info) and quite a few different paperwork got here to mild as the results of a lawsuit that Dias filed in opposition to the college in December final 12 months. Dias submitted a grievance to Rochester over its choice to take away his college students final August, however the college refused to listen to the grievance on the grounds that it did “not relate to educational freedom”. The physicist’s lawsuit claims that this response was unreasonable. A college spokesperson declined to touch upon the specifics of ongoing litigation and personnel issues, however emphasised that Rochester is “vigorously defending its plan of action”.
In March, Nature’s information staff uncovered particulars about how Dias distorted knowledge to make claims about room-temperature superconductivity in two now-retracted papers printed in Nature1,2, and the way he manipulated his college students to maintain them at the hours of darkness about these knowledge. (Nature’s information and journal groups are editorially unbiased.) Quickly after, the Wall Avenue Journal reported that Rochester’s investigation discovered proof of misconduct.
Now, Nature’s information staff can reveal the small print of that investigation. Paperwork filed by Rochester with the Monroe County Supreme Courtroom present that the investigation was ordered by the Nationwide Science Basis (NSF), a significant funder of US educational analysis that in 2021 awarded Dias a prestigious US$790,000 CAREER grant. The NSF Workplace of Inspector Basic declined to remark to Nature’s information staff on the investigation’s findings or the company’s future actions.
The 124-page investigation report is a surprising account of Dias’s deceit throughout the 2 Nature papers, in addition to two different now-retracted papers — one in Chemical Communications3 and one in Bodily Evaluate Letters (PRL)4. Within the two Nature papers, Dias claimed to have found room-temperature superconductivity — zero electrical resistance at ambient temperatures — first in a compound manufactured from carbon, sulfur and hydrogen (CSH)1 after which in a compound ultimately discovered to be manufactured from lutetium and hydrogen (LuH)2.
Capping years of allegations and analyses, the report methodically paperwork how Dias intentionally misled his co-authors, journal editors and the scientific neighborhood. A college spokesperson described the investigation as “a good and thorough course of,” which reached the proper conclusion.
Dias didn’t reply to requests for remark. His lawyer referred Nature’s information staff to paperwork filed with the lawsuit. In a type of, Dias mentioned: “It’s crucial to reassert the foundational integrity and scientific validity of our work amidst the criticisms and accusations.”
A trio of inquiries
The NSF-ordered investigation wasn’t the primary time Rochester examined potential issues in Dias’s laboratory. Between 2021 and 2022, the college carried out three preliminary ‘inquiries’ into the CSH Nature paper1 — some particulars of which at the moment are revealed by the investigation report. Any of the inquiries may have determined {that a} full misconduct investigation was warranted, however none of them did.
The primary inquiry was initiated after Jorge Hirsch, a condensed-matter theorist on the College of California, San Diego, despatched complaints to Rochester. The college requested three unnamed inside reviewers, and Dias contacted one exterior reviewer to look at Hirsch’s claims. Info within the report means that the exterior reviewer is Maddury Somayazulu, a physicist at Argonne Nationwide Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois.
Hirsch alleged that there have been issues with the paper’s magnetic susceptibility knowledge — proof essential to Dias’s declare that CSH is a room-temperature superconductor. The inquiry got here to the conclusion on 19 January 2022 that there was “no credible proof to warrant additional investigation”.
College students on campus on the College of Rochester in New York.Credit score: Libby March/Bloomberg by way of Getty
The second inquiry was prompted by Dirk van der Marel, editor-in-chief of Physica C, a journal for superconductivity analysis. Van der Marel despatched Rochester his personal considerations about the identical CSH knowledge on 20 January 2022 — only a day after the primary inquiry ended. One other reviewer took up the case and judged no formal investigation was warranted on 6 April of that 12 months. Their work was checked by a second reviewer, who seems to be Russell Hemley, a physicist on the College of Illinois Chicago, primarily based on figuring out info within the report. Though the reviewers didn’t help an investigation, they mentioned that the paper was “verging on deceptive on account of omission of particulars”. They really helpful that an erratum be utilized (none was).
Rochester’s investigation notes that two reviewers — apparently Somayazulu and Hemley — have collaborated with Dias on a number of papers, together with a research5 in 2021 concerning the properties of CSH. Rochester’s educational misconduct coverage states that “no particular person who has an unresolved private, skilled or monetary battle of curiosity … ought to take part within the proceedings” of an inquiry.
A spokesperson for Argonne denied that Somayazulu was an inquiry reviewer, however didn’t reply when requested why a footnote within the investigation refers to “Report of Somayazulu_Review of NSF 2020 (CSH) Paper”. Hemley didn’t make clear whether or not he was an inquiry reviewer.
Nature’s journals staff carried out its personal investigation into the CSH paper utilizing unbiased reviewers, two of whom discovered proof that the magnetic susceptibility knowledge had been most likely fabricated. When the journal indicated that it will retract the CSH paper, and in response to a different grievance from Hirsch, the college carried out a 3rd inquiry. Regardless of gaining access to Nature’s findings, the only reviewer assigned to this inquiry — the identical nameless reviewer from the second inquiry — concluded on 19 October 2022 that any oddities within the knowledge could possibly be attributed to how they had been processed, and that no investigation was wanted.
Rochester’s inquiries “needs to be ‘Exhibit A’ about how to not run certainly one of these items,” says Peter Armitage, a condensed-matter experimentalist at Johns Hopkins College in Baltimore, Maryland.
Below investigation
Rochester was lastly pressured to launch a full investigation to find out misconduct by the NSF. In October 2022, James Hamlin, a physicist on the College of Florida in Gainesville, submitted considerations about Dias’s work to the NSF. These included “knowledge discrepancies that can’t be attributed to knowledge processing”, in accordance with a 16 March 2023 letter from the NSF to Stephen Dewhurst, the then-interim vice-president for analysis at Rochester.
Inside weeks, Dewhurst assembled a committee of three physicists exterior to Rochester “to make sure that this investigation can be credible”: Marius Millot and Peter Celliers, each at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory in California; and Marcus Knudson, at Sandia Nationwide Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Nature’s information staff requested a number of superconductivity researchers to assessment the investigation report. At first, they had been involved by the college’s selection of committee members. The three physicists are specialists in shock-wave physics, not in superconductivity. Millot and Celliers had been additionally co-authors with Dias on a 27-author assessment paper printed earlier this 12 months6.
Nevertheless, these doubts evaporated when the researchers learn the report. “I couldn’t assist however be extremely impressed,” Armitage says. Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State College in Ames, says: “There needs to be German phrase that’s 50 letters lengthy and is concurrently ‘spectacular’ and ‘miserable’” to explain the report. Brad Ramshaw, a physicist at Cornell College in Ithaca, New York, concurs. “This can be a nice sacrifice of their time,” he says. “The entire neighborhood needs to be grateful that we’ve colleagues who’re keen to go to those lengths.”
The three investigators didn’t reply to requests for remark.
The investigation committee secured data, together with knowledge on pc arduous drives, e-mails and bodily notebooks, in the midst of their work. Additionally they carried out interviews with 10 people linked with the case, together with Dias and a few of his former college students, and met not less than 50 occasions to deliberate.
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Notably, the investigators confirmed earlier analyses by van der Marel, Hirsch, Hamlin and Ramshaw — all of whom discovered obvious proof that Dias fabricated magnetic susceptibility knowledge within the CSH paper.
The report clarifies the extent of this misconduct: first Dias fabricated CSH knowledge and printed it. Then, when its origins got here beneath scrutiny, Dias and his collaborator and co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), launched a set of fabricated uncooked knowledge.
Questions on discrepancies between the uncooked and the printed knowledge continued to mount, so Dias crafted an evidence — he claimed to have used an elaborate data-processing technique for the printed knowledge. This supplied “a veneer of plausibility, by focusing critics’ consideration on background subtraction strategies” as an alternative of on the uncooked knowledge, the investigation committee wrote.
Salamat didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Truth discovering
At any time all through the investigation, Dias may have dispelled many allegations if he had supplied real uncooked knowledge — knowledge taken straight from a measuring instrument and containing particulars corresponding to timestamps. “The absence of sure uncooked knowledge information doesn’t inherently point out their non-existence or counsel any misconduct on my half,” Dias wrote in response to the investigation findings. But he promised to ship uncooked knowledge a number of occasions and by no means did, in accordance with the report.
In a number of cases, the investigation discovered, Dias deliberately misled his staff members and collaborators concerning the origins of knowledge. Via interviews, the investigators labored out that Dias had advised his companions at UNLV that measurements had been taken at Rochester, however had advised researchers at Rochester that they had been taken at UNLV.
Dias additionally lied to journals. Within the case of the retracted PRL paper4 — which was concerning the electrical properties of manganese disulfide (MnS2) — the journal carried out its personal investigation and concluded that there was obvious fabrication and “a deliberate try and hinder the investigation” by offering reviewers with manipulated knowledge quite than uncooked knowledge. The investigators commissioned by Rochester confirmed the journal’s findings that Dias had taken electrical resistance knowledge on germanium tetraselenide from his personal PhD thesis and handed these knowledge off as coming from MnS2 — a totally totally different materials with totally different properties (see ‘Odd similarity’). When questioned about this by the investigators, Dias despatched them the identical manipulated knowledge that was despatched to PRL.
Supply: James Hamlin
How precisely Dias distorted knowledge was clearest within the report’s findings concerning the LuH paper2. With the help of Dias’s former college students, the investigation committee pinpointed uncooked knowledge on the lab’s arduous drives. These knowledge confirmed that Dias continuously made selective omissions to hide “erratic drops and jumps within the resistance knowledge, the presence of which might undermine the declare of superconducting habits in LuH”, the investigation committee wrote.
Dias, the investigation committee discovered, “repeatedly lied” about knowledge throughout Nature’s assessment of the paper after considerations got here to mild. However maybe essentially the most egregious occasion of misconduct, which the report refers to as involving “profuse manipulations” of knowledge, occurred when Dias inverted a set of LuH knowledge in order that it demonstrated the Meissner impact — a pointy change within the magnetic properties of a cloth that could be a hallmark of superconductivity. On 27 August 2022, Sachith Dissanayake, a co-author who was then a school member working with Dias at Rochester, defined to Dias that the information had been improperly manipulated, however Dias ignored the warning, in accordance with the report. In his response to the report, Dias claimed Dissanayake misunderstood the information. Dissanayake didn’t reply to a request for remark.
These manipulated knowledge had been key to the LuH paper’s acceptance. And the investigation committee concluded that Dias fabricated knowledge “to persuade Nature editors and pre-publication referees that LuH displays superconductivity at room temperature”.
Earlier tales in Physics Journal and Science reported allegations of serial plagiarism by Dias, together with that he copied greater than 20% of his 2013 thesis from different sources. The Rochester investigators uncovered one other, newer occasion: on 30 July 2020, researchers, together with Dias’s colleagues at Rochester, submitted a scientific manuscript7 to the preprint server arXiv. Twelve days later, Dias submitted an NSF grant proposal that included paragraphs copied from that manuscript, in addition to two similar figures. That proposal later received Dias the CAREER grant from the company. In his response to the investigation, Dias admits to “cases the place references are inadvertently missed”.
Closing arguments
The investigation committee despatched Dias a draft copy of its report on 22 December final 12 months. In a two-part response totalling lots of of pages, which was revealed within the lawsuit, Dias assaults the experience and integrity of the investigators. The physicist asserts that the investigators’ method shows “traits that might generally be seen within the realm of conspiracy theories” and that it’s “missing a sturdy logical basis”. Dias additionally claims that Salamat satisfied Dias’s former college students to oppose him once they despatched a letter to Nature asking to retract the LuH paper. The other is true: Nature’s information staff beforehand reported that it was the scholars who initiated the letter.
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Nowhere within the response does Dias present the uncooked knowledge requested by the committee. Of their ultimate report, the investigators reply to Dias’s accusations, saying that the “invocation of baroque explanations to interpret, and subsequently justify, the omission of those knowledge doesn’t alter the Investigation Committee’s reasoning or findings”.
Finally, the committee discovered that the Rochester college students and Dissanayake weren’t culpable, however victims. The committee didn’t have entry to sources at UNLV to clear these researchers, together with Salamat, from blame, however it concluded that these events too had been deceived, and didn’t discover “substantial proof of wrongdoing”.
In consequence, the investigators really helpful that Dias shouldn’t be permitted to show or to hold out public or privately funded analysis. They added: “Proof uncovered on this investigation reveals that [Dias] can’t be trusted”.
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