Another Retraction Imminent for Controversial Physicist

A prominent journal has decided to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors -- materials that would not require any cooling to conduct electricity with zero resistance. From a report: The forthcoming retraction, of a paper published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) in 20211, is significant because the Nature news team has learnt that it is the result of an investigation that found apparent data fabrication. PRL's decision follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias's papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September. After receiving an e-mail last year expressing concern about possible data fabrication in Dias's PRL paper -- a study, not about room-temperature superconductivity, but about the electrical properties of manganese disulfide (MnS2) -- the journal commissioned an investigation by four independent referees. Nature's news team has obtained documents about the investigation, including e-mails and three reports of its outcome, from sources who have asked to remain anonymous. "The findings back up the allegations of data fabrication/falsification convincingly," PRL's editors wrote in an e-mail obtained by Nature.

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