Vestiges of the Schon fraud in solid state physics

Although Alcatel Sikahema'd its internet copy of the Beasley report on the Schon fraud, other sad vestiges of the foolery remain:

Physics Today, while placing a warning on the webpage, decided (honestly) to forego the sikahema action and still posts:

The first C60 superconductors were made by incorporating alkali atoms into the spaces between the closely packed C60 spheres. These atoms acted as electron donors because their outer electrons were quickly stripped away by the buckyballs, which have a high affinity for electrons. Unfortunately, Tc seemed to reach a maximum of 40 K, obtained by doping C60 with rubidium atoms. Last year, while working at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Jan Hendrik Schön (also of the University of Konstanz, Germany), Christian Kloc, and Bertram Batlogg (now at ETH Zürich) took Tc up to 52 K by finding a way to inject holes instead of electrons (see Physics Today, January 2001, page 15). Nice, but still far from the Tc region reached by the cuprates.

The achievement of 52 K was only a taste of things to come, however. The same Bell Labs-ETH team noted at the time that the Tc for electron-doped C60 increases with the size of the dopants: Larger dopants spread the C60 molecules farther apart and lead to higher values of Tc, by as much as a factor of 3 for a small percentage change in lattice spacing: When the C60 molecules are farther apart, the energy bands grow narrower, so that the density of states--and concomitantly the Tc--gets higher. Perhaps, the trio reasoned, the same trend would also govern hole-doped crystals.

(...)

"The implications of this work are gigantic," said Robert Cava of Princeton University. "They show us that the only thing that's stood in the way of finding more 100-K superconductors is thermodynamics." According to a prevailing view, he explained, the same interactions that give rise to conventional superconductivity can also break crystal structures apart or cause structural distortions that change the electronic states at the Fermi energy and thus kill the potential for superconductivity. Normally, compounds are made by heating the components together at high temperatures; that process gives the system the energy needed to overcome the activation barriers and reach its thermodynamic ground state, where distortions set in. But Batlogg and company have foiled thermodynamics by forming their compound, with the correct size and electron count, at low temperature. The same trick can be tried on other materials, Cava suggested.

Look also here.

C&E News has a less pronounced warning on its story. One wonders how the "charmed existence" of the stories reported in December 2001 have fared in the ensuing six (6) years.

UPDATE

One can find a reference to Schon's "crossover" paper (in PRL) at

-->http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/compludoc/W/10105/00319007_2.htm [Universal Crossover from Band to Hopping Conduction in Molecular Organic Semiconductors / Schön, Jan Hendrik / Kloc, Christian / Batlogg, Bertram]


-->at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/crossref-forward-links/287/5455/1022
Universal Crossover from Band to Hopping Conduction in Molecular Organic Semiconductors
Jan Hendrik Schön,
Christian Kloc,
and Bertram Batlogg
Physical Review Letters 86, 3843 (2001).

There is a link to PROLA, which STILL allows one to buy the [fraudulent] article:
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v86/i17/p3843_1


[Note also: Enhanced Physical Properties in a Pentacene Polymorph
Theo Siegrist,
Christian Kloc,
Jan H. Schön,
Bertram Batlogg,
Robert C. Haddon,
Steffen Berg,
and Gordon A. Thomas
Angewandte Chemie 113, 1782 (2001). AND

Enhanced Physical Properties in a Pentacene Polymorph
Theo Siegrist,
Christian Kloc,
Jan H. Schön,
Bertram Batlogg,
Robert C. Haddon,
Steffen Berg,
and Gordon A. Thomas
Angewandte Chemie International Edition 40, 1732 (2001). AND

Organic Field-Effect Transistors—The Breakthrough at Last
Arno Kraft
ChemPhysChem 2, 163 (2001).

-->at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/10066/32281/01506582.pdf

State of the Art Electronic Devices Based on Organic Materials
Cantatore, E.
Solid-State Device Research Conference, 2001. Proceeding of the 31st European
Volume , Issue , 11-13 September 2001 Page(s): 25 - 34

-->at http://dspace.hrz.uni-dortmund.de:8080/browse-title?top=2003%2F5066