The Schön scandal was a case of academic misconduct and scientific fraud perpetuated by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born August 1970). He briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparently successful experiments with semiconductors that showed revolutionary results, but were discovered later to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded. He was also supposed to receive the William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois in 2002, but due to the intervention of Daniel C. Ralph of Cornell University (who was on the committee of the McMillan Award), Schön was never given the award. The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility which coauthors and reviewers of scientific articles bear in cases of scientific misbehavior. The discussion mainly concerned whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of articles, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud.
Beginning of fame Schön's topic of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997. During late 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs, where he worked on electronics in which conventional semiconducting elements (such as silicon) were replaced by crystalline organic (meaning carbon-based) materials. Schön, however, claimed spectacular ability for changing the conductivity of the organic materials, well beyond anything achieved to date. His measurements in most cases confirmed various theoretical predictions, notably that the organic materials could be made to display superconductivity or be used in lasers. The findings were published in prominent scientific publications, including the journals Science and Nature, and gained worldwide attention. However, no research group anywhere in the world succeeded in reproducing the results claimed by Schön. In 2001, he was listed as an author on an average of one newly published research paper every eight days. In the same 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 transition from using silicon-based electronics and toward using organic electronics. It would have allowed the continued miniaturization of transistors past the point at which silicon breaks down, which would continue Moore's law for much longer than was then predicted. It also would have drastically reduced the cost of electronics. A major element of Schön's work claimed that successful observation of various physical phenomena in organic materials was dependent on the transistor setup. Specifically, Schön claimed to use a thin layer of aluminium oxide which he incorporated into his transistors using laboratory facilities at the University of Konstanz. However, while the equipment and materials used were common in laboratories all over the world, none succeeded in preparing aluminium oxide layers of similar quality to the ones claimed by Schön.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
