hendrik schon

Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002.

The Schön scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud. Contents [hide] 1 Rise to prominence 2 Allegations and investigation 3 Aftermath and sanctions 4 Withdrawn journal papers 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links //

Rise to prominence

Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology.[2] He received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997 he was hired by Bell Labs.

In 2001 he was listed as an author on an average of one research paper every eight days[2]. In that year he announced in Nature that he had produced a transistor on the molecular scale. Schön claimed to have used a thin layer of organic dye molecules to assemble an electric circuit that, when acted on by an electric current, behaved as a transistor. The implications of his work were significant. It would have been the beginning of a move away from silicon-based electronics and towards organic electronics. It would have allowed chips to continue shrinking past the point at which silicon breaks down, and therefore continue Moore's Law for much longer than is currently predicted. It also would have drastically reduced the cost of electronics.

Allegations and investigation

As recounted by Dan Agin in his book Junk Science[3], soon after Schön published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies. Professor Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise.[2] When the editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Professor Paul McEuen of Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment. More research by McEuen, Sohn and other physicists, uncovered a number of examples of duplicate data in Schön's work. This triggered a series of reactions that quickly led Lucent Technologies (which ran Bell Labs) to start a formal investigation.[4]

In May 2002 Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate this affair, with Professor Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University as chair.[5] The committee obtained information from all of Schön's coauthors, and interviewed the three principal ones (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg