Two different teams of physicists have retracted papers from Physical Review B after realizing that a sample used in the paper published first — and which formed the basis of the second paper — was mislabeled.
Here’s the notice for the first paper, “s-wave superconductivity in barium-doped phenanthrene as revealed by specific-heat measurements,” by Jianjun Ying of the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, and colleagues: Continue reading Mislabeled sample leads to a chain reaction of physics retractions