A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.
The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”
The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.
The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting:
a statement as a note added, elaborating on experimental details and additional data sets that previously did not pass the selection criteria. We have followed these recommendations and uploaded the documents to the Zenodo repository (https://zenodo.org/records/10676715, which can also be accessed as Ref. [81] in the original paper. A summary of that note added is this MEMO, which includes a summary of key points.
Marcus, who along with his co-authors hired an attorney to respond to the Practice Committee, which had commissioned the expert report, also said:
We hope that the Science editors will also accept the recommendations of the [expert panel].
We asked Marcus whether he agreed with the report’s statement that “the authors should have been more forthright and explicit with readers and with referees in describing their success rate in fabricating devices that showed simple tunneling characteristics and had MZM behavior and, by flagging alternatives and uncertainties, more evenhanded in their discussion of interpretations.” He said:
The quote you mention is not part of the conclusions. It was part of a longer commentary and taken out of context.
Frolov and Mourik told Retraction Watch:
We are pleased that Science forced the University of Copenhagen to conduct a more extensive investigation into this Microsoft/University of Copenhagen paper than the Niels Bohr Institute previously did when it resoundingly exonerated the authors. As we predicted, the new committee found more data from many more devices than the Niels Bohr Department Chair admitted existed in his inquiry, none in our view replicating the claimed Majorana discovery.
They continued:
Unfortunately, despite these unambiguous findings, the new committee (three of the four members of which had what we regard as conflicts of interest in the case) did not find the courage to recommend retraction, instead making the argument that everyone inflates their work to get into Science. It is unfortunate to see such cynicism and it is not fair to the editors who were told this was a big breakthrough. In our assessment, the claims in this paper amount to falsification and have been thoroughly debunked not only through our analysis, through separate publications in Nature and Science, but through the analysis in this new report as well. We stand by the original criticism we posted on Zenodo in 2022 that the authors’ additional data not shown in the paper disproves their claim of a Majorana signal.
Next up: The University of Copenhagen’s Practice Committee has notified the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct (DCRM) that it intends to decide on the case “on its own, unless the DCRM decides to call in the case for decision as a matter of research misconduct.”
A Nature paper on the same subject – sometimes referred to as a ‘Majorana’ particle – was retracted in 2021.
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