Scientist who reported room-temperature superconductivity faces more controversy Premium

Allegations of scientific misconduct against Ranga Dias refuse to subside.

On March 9, the physics journal  Physical Review Letters (PRL) launched an investigation into a June 2021 paper coauthored, among others, by Ranga Dias, following allegations of plagiarism, in the same week that Dias and others reported in a different journal that they had discovered room-temperature superconductivity in a material compressed by a few thousand atmospheres of pressure.

The new claim has thrust Dias and his colleagues back into the spotlight, where they have been before for claiming the discovery of superconductivity in similar circumstances, in europium in 2009 and carbonaceous sulphur hydride in 2020.

Now, Dias et al. have reported in  Nature that nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride becomes superconducting at 21º C and under 20,000 atmospheres (atm).

The claim has set the condensed-matter physics community aflutter because the discovery of superconductivity at or near room temperature and ambient pressure (i.e. 1 atm) is one of the field’s greatest pursuits. Researchers have found other materials that superconduct at or near room temperature but only when they’re compressed by 100-1,000-times more pressure.

However, even though the Dias et al. paper has been published in  Nature, a respectable journal, many other physicists have already said they will hold off on believing the study data until they can independently verify it. This is partly because of data availability and Dias’s previous track record – record that now includes the new investigation PRL has launched.

After Dias et al. reported in 2009 that europium becomes a superconductor at very low temperature and very high pressure, at least one scientist acquired the raw data from the experiments from one of the study’s coauthors and found evidence of manipulated data. Once the issues came to light, PRL – which had published the 2009 paper – retracted it in December 2021.

In October 2020, Dias and others reported in  Nature that carbonaceous sulphur hydride (CSH) at around 14º C and 2.6 million atm of pressure. Soon, independent scientists who synthesised the material according to the original recipe and conducted the same tests on it that Dias et al. had reached different results. The finding didn’t replicate.