NSF exonerating all co-authors made me cringe. Strictly speaking they did not really investigate them, but the report has some mild words for their position. I believe this is fine for many of the co-authors. But definitely not for some.

Take Ashkan Salamat. Assistant professor at the University of Nevada, so not some vulnerable student. Co-author on many Dias papers, including the two retracted Nature ones. Stood by Dias till the end. Salamat submitted a pre-print of which he is corresponding author: arxiv.org/abs/2201.11883. The pre-print is caustic, calling out Hirsch and van der Marel for "lack of scientific understanding", a "failure to appropriately analyze raw data", and " false representations". An update of that pre-print was retracted by arXiv for being too agressive. And that pre-print is by now thoroughly debunked, also by NSF. It is just smoke and mirrors, authors trying to safe their skin. I have no idea why Salamat escaped any investigation.

Rusell J. Hemley probably also deserves attention. In this arXiv, published after the 1st nature paper was retracted and just before the 2nd was published, he pledges support to the CSH superconductivity: arxiv.org/abs/2302.08622. And after the 2nd Nature paper on LuNH was published and got heavily criticized, Hemley published arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301. It claims to show LuNH is superconducting. Dias was there to help Hemley measure it (from NSF report). The results look like what the NSF report called measuring a loose contact.

Sep 2
at
1:49 PM