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official investigation reveals how superconductivity physicist faked blockbuster outcomes


Ranga Dias, the physicist on the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, dedicated knowledge fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, in response to a investigation commissioned by his college. Nature’s information crew found the bombshell investigation report in court docket paperwork.

The ten-month investigation, which concluded on 8 February, was carried out by an impartial 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 doubtless 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 tutorial 12 months.

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 resolution 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 tutorial 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 crew 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 in the dead of night about these knowledge. (Nature’s information and journal groups are editorially impartial.) Quickly after, the Wall Road Journal reported that Rochester’s investigation discovered proof of misconduct.

Now, Nature’s information crew can reveal the main points of that investigation. Paperwork filed by Rochester with the Monroe County Supreme Court docket present that the investigation was ordered by the Nationwide Science Basis (NSF), a significant funder of US tutorial 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 crew 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 fabricated from carbon, sulfur and hydrogen (CSH)1 after which in a compound ultimately discovered to be fabricated 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 crew to paperwork filed with the lawsuit. In a kind 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 doable 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 are actually revealed by the investigation report. Any of the inquiries might 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”.

Students on campus at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, U.S. in 2021.

College students on campus on the College of Rochester in New York.Credit score: Libby March/Bloomberg through 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, based mostly on figuring out info within the report. Though the reviewers didn’t assist an investigation, they mentioned that the paper was “verging on deceptive resulting from omission of particulars”. They really useful 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 examine5 in 2021 concerning the properties of CSH. Rochester’s tutorial 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 crew carried out its personal investigation into the CSH paper utilizing impartial reviewers, two of whom discovered proof that the magnetic susceptibility knowledge have been in all probability fabricated. When the journal indicated that it could retract the CSH paper, and in response to a different grievance from Hirsch, the college carried out a 3rd inquiry. Regardless of accessing 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 may very well be attributed to how they have been processed, and that no investigation was wanted.

Rochester’s inquiries “must 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.

Beneath 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 response to 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.

Nature’s information crew requested a number of superconductivity researchers to evaluation the investigation report. At first, they have been involved by the college’s alternative of committee members. The three physicists are specialists in shock-wave physics, not in superconductivity. Millot and Celliers have been additionally co-authors with Dias on a 27-author evaluation paper printed earlier this 12 months6.

Nonetheless, 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 must be a very good 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. “It is a nice sacrifice of their time,” he says. “The entire neighborhood must be grateful that we’ve colleagues who’re prepared to go to those lengths.”

The three investigators didn’t reply to requests for remark.

The investigation committee secured data, together with knowledge on laptop exhausting drives, e-mails and bodily notebooks, in the middle of their work. In addition they carried out interviews with 10 people linked with the case, together with Dias and a few of his former college students, and met no less than 50 instances to deliberate.

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 a proof — he claimed to have used an elaborate data-processing technique for the printed knowledge. This offered “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.

Reality discovering

At any time all through the investigation, Dias might have dispelled many allegations if he had offered real uncooked knowledge — knowledge taken straight from a measuring instrument and containing particulars akin to timestamps. “The absence of sure uncooked knowledge recordsdata doesn’t inherently point out their non-existence or recommend any misconduct on my half,” Dias wrote in response to the investigation findings. But he promised to ship uncooked knowledge a number of instances and by no means did, in response to the report.

In a number of situations, the investigation discovered, Dias deliberately misled his crew members and collaborators concerning the origins of knowledge. Via interviews, the investigators labored out that Dias had instructed his companions at UNLV that measurements have been taken at Rochester, however had instructed researchers at Rochester that they have 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 to hinder the investigation” by offering reviewers with manipulated knowledge somewhat 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.

ODD SIMILARITY. Graphic shows similarities between 2 different plots for electrical resistance taken from Ranga Dias's work.

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 exhausting drives. These knowledge confirmed that Dias regularly made selective omissions to hide “erratic drops and jumps within the resistance knowledge, the presence of which might undermine the declare of superconducting conduct in LuH”, the investigation committee wrote.

Dias, the investigation committee discovered, “repeatedly lied” about knowledge throughout Nature’s evaluation of the paper after considerations got here to mild. However maybe probably 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 fabric that may be a hallmark of superconductivity. On 27 August 2022, Sachith Dissanayake, a co-author who was then a college member working with Dias at Rochester, defined to Dias that the info had been improperly manipulated, however Dias ignored the warning, in response to the report. In his response to the report, Dias claimed Dissanayake misunderstood the info. Dissanayake didn’t reply to a request for remark.

These manipulated knowledge have 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 an identical figures. That proposal later gained Dias the CAREER grant from the company. In his response to the investigation, Dias admits to “situations 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 tons 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 would typically 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 after they despatched a letter to Nature asking to retract the LuH paper. The other is true: Nature’s information crew beforehand reported that it was the scholars who initiated the letter.

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, but it surely concluded that these events too have been deceived, and didn’t discover “substantial proof of wrongdoing”.

Because of this, the investigators really useful that Dias shouldn’t be permitted to show or to hold out public or privately funded analysis. They added: “Proof uncovered on this investigation exhibits that [Dias] can’t be trusted”.

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