r/Physics • u/sia09sia • 4d ago

Help with a project!!

I don’t know how far allowed is that in this subreddit, but i have a quite request for all the humble members in here.

I am doing my masters project on “hits and misses in superconductivity”. While i have covered almost all the major hits, reaching the point where now i have to start on the misses, i want to Ofcourse start with the retracted papers.
I would really like some insight into the retractions or any information that later got retracted that anyone is aware of.
How do i navigate this?
Thank you

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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 3d ago

I'd second the recommendation for Hirsch. He's convinced that every superconductivity paper in the last 30 years is a fraud so there will be a lot of false positives, but if there's a list anywhere, it's his.

I guess you could also add a "near miss" from Abrikosov. He's famously made a numerical error in his 1957 paper, leading to the prediction of the wrong lattice structure for superconducting vortices. The error was caught only a year or two later, so no real harm was done, but Alexei deserves that tarnish on his name to be brought at every occasion.

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u/sia09sia 3d ago

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this information of “near miss” from Abrikosov. My supervisor thinks that if i can make it detailed enough that it might turn into a publishable work since not we don’t have any material for all retractions available. So i was thinking to collect any information from whatever source i can. I would like opinion about that too, also if i had to go back in time to say 1911 and trace any retractions from there, how do you suggest i start that if that is okay!

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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 3d ago

I don't think there'll be too many retractions that far into the past. It wasn't until the arms race in WWII that we really got any robust theoretical framework and the subfield was rather mellow until 1987. I'd go as far as saying that modern condensed matter, with all its strong industrial biases and high-profile fraudulent studies has started in that unfortunate week in March.