Bell Labs inquiry spreads to superconductors

Washington

An investigation into possible data fabrication at Bell Laboratories has been expanded to include three important papers on superconductivity published in Nature.

Downturn: Lucent Technologies' share price, after stabilizing in 2001, fell sharply last month.

The additions to the investigation, which is being conducted by a panel chaired by Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University in California, have alarmed physicists, dozens of whom have been engaged in efforts to replicate the superconductivity work.

The expansion is also causing trepidation at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey — its struggling owner, Lucent Technologies, lost a third of its already-diminished stock-market valuation last week (see graph, right), as investors reacted to news of a multi-billion-dollar fraud at telecommunications firm WorldCom.

Papers co-authored by Jan Hendrik Schön on the use of organic molecules in microelectronics first came under suspicion in May, when researchers noticed two graphs in separate papers that appeared to be identical, right down to the noise in the data (see Nature 417, 367–368; 2002). The Beasley inquiry was set up and soon more than a dozen papers co-authored by Schön were under investigation. Schön stands by his results and is cooperating with the inquiry.

In recent weeks, the inquiry added three more papers co-authored by Schön^1,2,3 to its list, Beasley said at the end of last month. The papers describe how two fullerenes — C₆₀ and C₇₀ — and calcium copper oxide lose all electrical resistance (become superconducting) when they have been 'doped' using an electric field to add or remove electrons from their crystal structure. Two of the papers^1,2 were co-authored by Bertram Batlogg, one of the world's leading experts on superconductor physics, who is now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The three papers were brought to the panel's attention by several researchers, including Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University, New Jersey, who noticed similarities in the range of temperatures and charges in which two of the materials — C₆₀ and a calcium copper oxide — became superconducting.

Arthur Ramirez, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who is trying to reproduce Schön's work with C₆₀, admits that the similarities are “a little weird” but is withholding judgement on the reasons for them. Ramirez says he will press on with his effort while the Beasley panel completes its evaluation of the original result.

Meanwhile, the troubles of Lucent Technologies continue to mount, with the WorldCom scandal dashing hopes that demand for Lucent's products will revive any time soon. “The telecommunications sector is melting down,” says Scott Cleland, head of the Precursor Group, a Washington-based market analyst firm. “Many of these companies, including Lucent, are flirting with bankruptcy.”

David Farber, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a former researcher at Bell Labs, also sees tough times ahead for the laboratory. “When push comes to shove, what do you sacrifice first? Research,” he says. But Farber doesn't believe that the laboratory will shut. Lucent, or whoever takes over its business, will need research to stay competitive in the long run, he says.

Saswato Das, a spokesman for Bell Labs, expressed optimism about the future of basic research there. “We continue to be committed to creating the next-generation technologies to make our company successful,” he says. “Physical sciences research will be an essential component of that.”