Superconductor hopes dashed after journal retracts ‘red matter’ study

The scientific paper asserting the marvel materials dubbed “red matter”, which researchers claimed earlier this yr was the world’s first room-temperature superconductor, has been retracted by Nature. The retraction marks the tip of a year-long saga over room-temperature superconductors, following the failed replications of LK-99, one other materials that held the promise of revolutionising electronics and drove a web based frenzy.

Unlike LK-99, which was first printed within the comparatively little-known Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology, and took researchers without warning, the work on purple matter, or N-doped lutetium hydride, was printed in Nature and got here with the imprimatur of obvious scientific rigour.

But many individuals have been nonetheless initially sceptical of the claims, each due to the singular nature of the fabric – there isn’t a different superconductor that works at room temperature and low pressures – and the truth that one of many lead authors, Ranga Dias on the University of Rochester in New York state, had had a earlier superconductor paper in Nature retracted in 2022.

Now, the purple matter paper has been retracted. “There were very, very good reasons to doubt since the beginning about this paper,” says Lilia Boeri on the University of Rome in Italy. “I think it’s actually surprising that it took quite this long to retract this paper.”

Eight of the 11 authors have issues over “the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied”, they write in a observe accompanying the retraction. These points, they are saying, “undermine the integrity of the published paper”.

Three of the authors didn’t specific an opinion on the retraction, together with Dias, who has come below rising scrutiny for the reason that paper was first printed in March.

In August, Dias had one other paper retracted, in Physical Review Letters, and different researchers accused him of plagiarising sections of his PhD thesis. He has rejected each the Physical Review Letters and previous Nature retraction, and hasn’t publicly commented on claims of plagiarism.

Neither Dias nor the group of eight authors who requested the most recent retraction have responded to a request for remark from New Scientist.

For many researchers, that is the ultimate nail within the coffin for purple matter, after makes an attempt at replication earlier this yr repeatedly failed.

“This has been a huge waste of time,” says Graeme Ackland on the University of Edinburgh, UK.

While it’s commendable that researchers tried to faithfully replicate the outcomes, there may be nonetheless the query of how the paper made it to publication, he says. “It’s embarrassing for the field.”

“Everybody was surprised that this paper came out in Nature,” says Boeri.

“This has been a deeply frustrating situation. We were aware that this paper would likely be greeted with scepticism by many in the community given the retraction of an earlier related paper by this group,” stated Karl Ziemelis, chief utilized and bodily sciences editor at Nature, in an announcement. “Decisions about what to accept for publication are not always easy to make and there may be conflicts, but we strive to take an unbiased position and to ensure the interests of the community always drive our deliberations.”

“Rigorous peer review is always key; indeed, as is so often the case, the highly qualified expert reviewers we selected raised a number of questions about the original submission, which were largely resolved in later revisions,” he stated. “What the peer review process cannot detect is whether the paper as written accurately reflects the research as it was undertaken. This was the concern raised recently by a number of the authors, as detailed in the retraction notice.”

Although there’s a probability that this casts a shadow on the sphere, it’s a wholesome signal that there was scepticism from the very starting, says Boeri.