Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star's physics lab

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NEWS FEATURE | 08 March 2024

Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star’s physics lab

Ranga Dias claimed to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductors, but the work was later retracted. An investigation by Nature’s news team reveals new details about what happened — and how institutions missed red flags.

By Dan Garisto

In 2020, Ranga Dias was an up-and-coming star of the physics world. A researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, Dias achieved widespread recognition for his claim to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity without resistance at ambient temperatures. Dias published that finding in a landmark Nature paper(1).

Nearly two years later, that paper was retracted. But not long after, Dias announced an even bigger result, also published in Nature: another room-temperature superconductor (2). Unlike the previous material, the latest one supposedly worked at relatively modest pressures, raising the enticing possibility of applications such as superconducting magnets for medical imaging and powerful computer chips.

Most superconductors operate at extremely low temperatures, below 77 kelvin (−196 °C). So achieving superconductivity at room temperature (about 293 K, or 20 °C) would be a “remarkable phenomenon”, says Peter Armitage, a condensed-matter researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

But Dias is now infamous for the scandal that surrounds his work. Nature has since retracted his second paper(2) and many other research groups have tried and failed to replicate Dias’s superconductivity results. Some researchers say the debacle has caused serious harm. The scandal “has damaged careers of young scientists — either in the field, or thinking to go into the field”, says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames.

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