Jan Hendrik Schön

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

The Schön scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. Peer review is designed to find errors, as well as determine relevance and originality of papers, rather than detect fraud. It was still disturbing to some that none of Schön's misrepresentations were caught by the peer review process.

Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 1997. At the end of 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs.

Meteoric rise

In 2001, he was listed as an author on an average of one research paper every eight days. In 2001 he announced in Nature that he had produced a transistor on the molecular scale. He 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.

Allegation and investigation

Soon after he published his work, others in the physics community alleged that Schön's data contained anomalies. In particular, they said the data seemed overly precise, and that some of it contradicted the prevailing understanding of physics. Professor Lydia Sohn, of the University of California at Berkeley, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. 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. In total, 25 papers by Schön and 20 coauthors were considered suspect.

In May, 2002, Bell Labs appointed Professor Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University to chair a committee to investigate possible scientific fraud. The committee sent questionnaires to all of Schön's coauthors, and interviewed his three principal coauthors (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg, and Christian Kloc). They examined electronic drafts of the disputed papers, which included processed numeric data. They requested copies of raw data but found that Schön had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw data files had been erased from his computer. According to Schön, the files were erased because his computer had limited hard drive space. In addition, all of his experimental samples had been discarded or damaged beyond repair.

On September 25, 2002, the committee publicly released its report. The report contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct. They found evidence of Schön's scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them. They found that whole data sets were reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his graphs, which purportedly had been plotted from experimental data, had instead been produced using mathematical functions.

The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Schön alone. All coauthors were completely exonerated of scientific misconduct. However, it was unclear whether all of them had exercised sufficient professional responsibility in trusting the integrity of his data. Minor coauthors were found to have reasonably fulfilled their responsibilities, but the question was raised of whether Bertram Batlogg, the leader of Schön's research group until mid 2000, might not have been sufficiently critical. Although Batlogg, who has been professor at the ETH Zurich since September 2000, took appropriate action once concerns were explicitly raised to him, perhaps he should have more closely examined the results earlier, in view of their exceptional nature. There existed no general consensus on the responsibility of coauthors of a paper, so the committee declared itself unqualified to resolve this issue. Batlogg was not formally reprimanded.

Bell Labs fired Schön on the day they received the report. It was the first known case of fraud in the lab's history.

Withdrawn journal papers

On October 31, 2002, Science withdrew 8 papers written by Schön ^*:

J. H. Schön, S. Berg, Ch. Kloc, B. Batlogg, Ambipolar pentacene field-effect transistors and inverters, Science 287, 1022 (2000)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, R. C. Haddon, B. Batlogg, A superconducting field-effect switch, Science 288, 656 (2000)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, B. Batlogg, Fractional quantum Hall effect in organic molecular semiconductors, Science 288, 2338 (2000)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, A. Dodabala-pur, B. Batlogg, An organic solid state injection laser, Science 289, 599 (2000)
J. H. Schön, A. Dodabalapur, Ch. Kloc, B. Batlogg, A light-emitting field-effect transistor, Science 290, 963 (2000)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, H. Y. Hwang, B. Batlogg, Josephson junctions with tunable weak links, Science 292, 252 (2001)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, B. Batlogg, High-temperature superconductivity in lattice-expanded C₆₀, Science 293, 2432 (2001)
J. H. Schön, H. Meng, Z. Bao, Field-effect modulation of the conductance of single molecules, Science 294, 2138 (2001)

On December 20, 2003, the Physical Review journals withdrew 6 papers written by Schön ^*:

J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, R. A. Laudise, and B. Batlogg, Electrical properties of single crystals of rigid rodlike conjugated molecules, Phys. Rev. B 58, 12952-12957 (1998)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, and B. Batlogg, Hole transport in pentacene single crystals, Phys. Rev. B 63, 245201 (2001)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, D. Fichou, and B. Batlogg, Conjugation length dependence of the charge transport in oligothiophene single crystals, Phys. Rev. B 64, 035209 (2001)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, and B. Batlogg, Mobile iodine dopants in organic semiconductors, Phys. Rev. B 61, 10803-10806
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, and B. Batlogg, Low-temperature transport in high-mobility polycrystalline pentacene field-effect transistors, Phys. Rev. B 63, 125304 (2001)
J. H. Schön, Ch. Kloc, and B. Batlogg, Universal Crossover from Band to Hopping Conduction in Molecular Organic, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3843-3846 (2001)

On March 5, 2003, Nature withdrew 7 papers written by Schön ^*:

Schön, J. H., Kloc, Ch. & Batlogg, B. Superconductivity at 52K in hole-doped C₆₀. Nature 408, 549-552 (2000).
Schön, J. H. et al. Gate-induced superconductivity in a solution-processed organic polymer film. Nature 410, 189- 192 (2001).
Schön, J. H., Meng, H. & Bao, Z. Self-assembled monolayer organic field-effect transistors. Nature 413, 713-716 (2001).
Schön, J. H. et al. Superconductivity in single crystals of the fullerene C₇₀. Nature 413, 831-833 (2001).
Schön, J. H. et al. Superconductivity in CaCuO₂ as a result of field-effect doping. Nature 414, 434-436 (2001).

Aftermath and sanctions

Schön acknowledged that the data was incorrect in many of these papers. He claims that the substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. He admits to falsifying some data but states he did so to show more convincing evidence for behaviour that he observed. He continues to maintain that his experiments worked, and that molecular-sized transistors are possible using the techniques he demonstrated.

Experimenters at Delft University of Technology and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center have since performed experiments similar to Schön's. They did not obtain similar results. Also before the allegations became public, several research groups tried - without success - to reproduce most of the groundbreaking results in the field of the physics of organic molecular materials.

Schön was deprived of his doctoral degree by the University of Konstanz in June 2004, even though there was no indication that his work conducted as a student was related to his subsequent scandal at Bell Labs (^*).

In October 2004, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (trans.: German Research Foundation) Joint Committee announced sanctions against him. The former DFG post-doctorate fellow was deprived of his active right to vote in DFG elections or serve on DFG committees for an eight-year period. During this time, Schön will also be unable to serve as a peer reviewer or apply for DFG funds (pdf press release).

External links

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Meteoric rise

Allegation and investigation

Withdrawn journal papers

Aftermath and sanctions

See also

External links