US team retracts bombshell superconductor study after Chinese researchers challenge findings
- Science journal Nature has retracted a paper by a team of US scientists which claimed to have created a room-temperature superconducting material
- Doubt was cast over the findings when several scientific teams in China were unable to replicate the US researchers’ results
Earlier this year, the paper made global headlines in both mainstream media and on social media after it was published in one of the oldest, most prestigious, scientific journals.
But in a retraction notice on November 7, eight of the paper’s 11 authors, most of them from the University of Rochester in New York, requested to withdraw the research as it “does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied”.
This meant the study’s key data had been manipulated and the superconductivity observed was an experimental artefact, according to Dirk van der Marel, honorary professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
01:52
China completes superconducting test run for 1,000km/h ultra high-speed maglev train
