A team of 11 scientists reported in March in the journal Nature that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Eight of those scientists have now asked Nature to retract their paper.
That pits them against the man who led the research: Ranga P. Dias, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Rochester in New York. In the past few years, Dr. Dias has made several extraordinary scientific claims, but he has also been embroiled in a series of allegations of scientific misconduct.
The retraction request will add to the scrutiny of Dr. Dias and Unearthly Materials, a company that Dr. Dias founded to turn the superconductivity discoveries into commercial products. Unearthly Materials has raised $16.5 million from investors.
It also raises questions about how editors at Nature, one of the most prestigious journals in the scientific world, vet submissions and decide which are worthy of publication. Nature had already published and retracted a previous paper from Dr. Dias’s group describing a different purported superconductor.
Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity without any electrical resistance, and one that works in everyday conditions could find wide use in the transmission of electricity and for powerful magnets used in MRI machines and future fusion reactors. Superconductors discovered to date require ultracold temperatures.
In the Nature paper, Dr. Dias and his co-authors described how lutetium hydride — a material made of lutetium, a silvery-white metal, and hydrogen — gained new electronic properties when a tiny bit of nitrogen was added. When squeezed to a pressure of 145,000 pounds per square inch, the material not only changed color, from blue to red (leading Dr. Dias to give it the nickname of redmatter), but also turned into a superconductor, able to effortlessly carry electricity at temperatures as warm as 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the scientists said in the Nature paper.
Skeptics almost…