FILE PHOTO: A team from Nature, through court documents, has found that Ranga Dias, professor at University of Rochester who had touted the discovery of room-temperature superconductor in March last year, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. 
| Photo Credit: J. ADAM FENSTER

A team from Nature, through court documents, has found that Ranga Dias, professor at University of Rochester who had touted the discovery of room-temperature superconductor in March last year, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. The publication found an investigation report in court documents that stated the physicist had committed scientific misconduct. 

The 10-month-long investigation, which concluded on February 8, was carried out by a group of scientists, recruited by the University of Rochester in New York, to look into 16 allegations against Mr. Dias. The university is reportedly planning to fire Dias, a tenure-track faculty member at the college before his contract expires at the end of the 2024-25 academic year. 

Dias had made a sensational claim of having discovered a superconductor capable of working at room temperature– a scientific feat which hadn’t been achieved before. The discovery implied that materials now existed that could conduct electricity with zero resistance and without requiring any cooling. But six months after the buzz, Dias was accused of manipulating data. The science publication found that he had manipulated students and kept them in the dark about the data. 

“Dias, the investigation committee found, ‘repeatedly lied’ about data during Nature’s review of the paper after concerns came to light. But perhaps the most egregious instance of misconduct, which the report refers to as involving “profuse manipulations” of data,” the report stated. His papers were retracted post this. 

It was later found that Dias, who had been investigating room-temperature superconductivity since 2020, had an earlier paper also retracted due to plagiarism. 

Dias had made claims in his studies that two materials CSH, which is a mix of carbon, sulfur and hydrogen, and LuH, a compound made of lutetium and hydrogen, had been detected as superconductors at room-temperature conditions. But when his findings were examined by other scientists and Nature, they found gaps in the data submitted. The University launched the official investigation after his paper was retracted.