Jan Hendrik Schön's Physics Papers

Jan Hendrik Schön produced a dazzling string of 16 papers on superconductivity and molecular electronics at Bell Labs before his fraud was exposed in 2002. An investigation found he had reused identical noise plots across multiple studies, fabricated data in at least 12 of 16 retracted papers, and claimed breakthroughs that were physically impossible, such as a single organic molecule switching at 1 GHz. Schön's output was 30% higher than #2's in terms of retracted papers, and his deception misled researchers worldwide for 2 years, costing an estimated $10 million in follow-up experiments and damaging the credibility of condensed matter physics.