---
id: "20260809-0225-verify-hirschs-forensic-critique"
title: "Verify Hirsch's forensic critique, the 'data alteration and manipulation' quote, and the Sept 2022 Nature retraction of Dias's room-temperature superconductivity paper against primaries"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
origin: "batch"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-nature-2022-csh-retraction-cites-undisclosed-background-subtraction.md","30-notes/claim-hirsch-modeled-csh-critique-on-2009-debessai-europium-precedent.md","30-notes/claim-hirsch-van-der-marel-2022-csh-data-pathological-spline-quantized.md","30-notes/claim-hirsch-arxiv-sanctions-two-distinct-events-dec2021-feb2022.md","30-notes/claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction.md (revised existing note: Reyer->Dirk van der Marel correction, joint-quote framing, arXiv-ban split, new Tier-1 links)","40-entities/entity-jorge-e-hirsch.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-ranga-dias.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-mathew-debessai.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-dirk-van-der-marel.md (new hub)"]
not_promoted: ["The four 'Further leads' bullets (Rochester's two internal inquiries clearing Dias; Dias's cease-and-desist letters to van der Marel and Hirsch's UCSD chair/dean; Hirsch's blockedarxiv directory; the 2023 lutetium-hydride retraction) — the capture itself flagged these as unexplored this session; left as future-capture ideas rather than promoted on thin verification.","Ashkan Salamat as an entity hub — real, co-senior-author of the CSH paper, on record defending it, but only a single passing mention this session; not yet load-bearing enough to clear the person-hub bar (unlike Debessai/van der Marel, who anchor specific new claim-notes). Left as a prose-mention candidate, not a hub.","Kit Chapman as an entity hub — named journalist whose reporting carries the load-bearing quote, but a byline attribution is provenance, not a vault-domain figure; cited in claim-note frontmatter/provenance instead.","The exact verbatim wording of the joint 'data alteration and manipulation' CSH-specific quote as a Tier-1 primary fact — still only Tier 2 (Chemistry World); routed back to the existing [[question-verify-hirsch-dias-superconductivity-retraction-primaries]], ruled partially answered rather than force-closed."]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "batch run, 2026-08-09"
derived_from: []
tags: ["research-integrity","fraud-detection","physics","condensed-matter","superconductivity","hirsch","retraction","verification"]
sources: [{"source_url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9","source_sha":"987160fdafe8266b57540e3a5396e10ff9a7b34328d9f873f44584546fd5c568","source_author":"Elliot Snider, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride et al. (retraction issued by Nature's editors)","source_date":"2022-09-26","source_title":"Retraction Note: Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride","source_venue":"Nature 610, 804 (2022); DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05294-9","source_tier":1,"source_note":"The retraction notice itself. Fetched via archive_page (Nature's own domain, no block encountered)."},{"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12854","source_sha":"4991c47f98c1815953c0ffed4c627f3180de15e501631fbae4d941efe862dfed","source_author":"J. E. Hirsch","source_date":"2021-10-15 (submitted); withdrawn 2021-12-09 (v2)","source_title":"On the ac magnetic susceptibility of a room temperature superconductor: anatomy of a probable scientific fraud","source_venue":"arXiv:2110.12854 [physics.soc-ph]","source_tier":1,"source_note":"arXiv's own abstract page for Hirsch's original CSH-fraud paper. No PDF is retrievable -- the submission itself was withdrawn by arXiv administrators, which is itself the primary record of that fact."},{"source_url":"https://jorge.physics.ucsd.edu/abstracts/pre-proof.pdf","source_sha":"9d99e8884241dd1a547b76eb20b5e5a9f881970079c513afbb0242967e5b8144","source_author":"J. E. Hirsch","source_date":"2021 (Physica C 590, 1353964; dated internally to 2021-08-25)","source_title":"On the ac magnetic susceptibility of a room temperature superconductor: anatomy of a probable scientific fraud","source_venue":"Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications 590, 1353964 (2021), pre-proof PDF hosted on the author's own UCSD faculty site","source_tier":1,"source_delight":"Hirsch's own faculty page hosts the pre-proof of the paper that Nature and Physical Review Letters both declined to publish, with a year-by-year email log of his own data requests to Dias built into the text.","source_note":"Fetched via extract_pdf, tls verified. This is the peer-reviewed (Physica C) version of the arXiv paper that was later withdrawn; the abstract page (jorge.physics.ucsd.edu/abstracts/cshnew.html) links to it directly as 'pre-proof (pdf)'."},{"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07686v7","source_sha":"bf645f518db1087107eec70a87710350544c43ae5d6e217473ea8822b29e0b90","source_author":"D. van der Marel and J. E. Hirsch","source_date":"2022-01-19 (v1); 2022-08-06 (v7)","source_title":"Extended Comment on Nature 586, 373 (2020) by E. Snider et al.","source_venue":"arXiv:2201.07686 [cond-mat.supr-con]; published in International Journal of Modern Physics B (2022)","source_tier":1,"source_note":"Fetched via extract_pdf, tls verified. The joint Hirsch + van der Marel technical analysis of the published CSH susceptibility data."},{"source_url":"https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/under-pressure-room-temperature-superconductivity-paper-retracted-over-data-analysis/4016309.article","source_sha":"066e2fd2783f76618597565ecce86b90feb2f604b2fee8bf1b303681537a1d8d","source_author":"Kit Chapman","source_date":"2022-09-29","source_title":"Under pressure? Room temperature superconductivity paper retracted over data analysis","source_venue":"Chemistry World (Royal Society of Chemistry)","source_tier":2,"source_note":"Fetched via archive_page directly against chemistryworld.com. This is the ONLY source located this session, primary or secondary, that carries the exact load-bearing phrase 'data alteration and manipulation' as a direct quotation with clear dual attribution."},{"source_url":"https://www.science.org/content/article/something-seriously-wrong-room-temperature-superconductivity-study-retracted","source_sha":"141d8dd6028080bf8a6ccad6117851a338d8c111581d05cbedd6c4a3ab22ced8","source_author":"Eric Hand","source_date":"2022-09-26","source_title":"'Something is seriously wrong': Room-temperature superconductivity study retracted","source_venue":"Science (AAAS), Vol 377, Issue 6614","source_tier":2,"source_note":"science.org 403s archive_page and WebFetch directly (consistent with the 2026-07-10 audit note on the existing claim-note). Retrieved instead via a Wayback Machine capture (timestamp 20250804180707) of the original URL, which the original venue itself still serves live -- the capture, not the live page, is what was actually read and is what source_sha certifies."}]
seek_code_commit: "46c6736"
---


This capture answers
[[question-verify-hirsch-dias-superconductivity-retraction-primaries]], which
flagged that [[claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction]]
rested entirely on Tier-2 science journalism the batch worker could not
re-fetch, and asked for three things against primaries: the load-bearing
quote's exact source and attribution, Hirsch's mechanism in his own words, and
the *Nature* retraction notice itself. All three are now grounded directly.
science.org still 403s every fetch route tried (confirming the 2026-07-10
audit's finding, not a new block); Chemistry World and Nature's own site did
not block anything this session.

## Claim: Nature's own retraction notice confirms the September 26, 2022 date and the specific mechanism -- a non-standard, undisclosed background-subtraction procedure

**Claim type:** quantitative (date) + technical-mechanism. Tier 1-2 required;
met at Tier 1.

Nature's retraction notice for "Room-temperature superconductivity in a
carbonaceous sulfur hydride" (Snider, Dasenbrock-Gammon, Dias et al., *Nature*
586, 373, 2020) was published 26 September 2022. The editors' own stated
reason: "We have now established that some key data processing steps —
namely, the background subtractions applied to the raw data used to generate
the magnetic susceptibility plots in Fig. 2a and Extended Data Fig. 7d — used
a non-standard, user-defined procedure. The details of the procedure were not
specified in the paper and the validity of the background subtraction has
subsequently been called into question." All nine authors, including
[[Ranga Dias]], disagreed with the retraction and maintained the raw data
support the paper's claims. This confirms, at Tier 1, the retraction date and
mechanism the existing claim-note carried only from Tier-2 secondaries.

*provenance*: Nature retraction notice, 2022-09-26 (Tier 1).

## Claim: Hirsch's own technical papers ground the forensic mechanism -- susceptibility data that is too smooth and internally inconsistent with the claimed measurement method, not merely "suspicious" by secondary characterization

**Claim type:** technical-mechanism. Tier 1-2 required; met at Tier 1.

In his own Physica C paper, Hirsch argues the published curves fail because
(1) the one sample of "raw data" Snider et al. did publish shows behavior
"completely contrary to what is expected for a superconductor," and (2) it
closely resembles, in shape and magnitude, the raw data underlying a 2009
*Physical Review Letters* claim of superconductivity in europium by
[[Mathew Debessai]] and coauthors -- a paper Hirsch had by then obtained the
actual measured data for, and which he presents in the same paper as a
demonstrated case: "The evidence of Examples 1, 2 and 3 discussed above
establish unequivocally that extensive data alteration and manipulation
occurred in going from measured data to published data for Fig. 2 of [10]"
(ref. 10 being the 2009 Debessai et al. europium paper). Hirsch explicitly
uses this prior, confirmed case as his model for what he believes happened to
the CSH data, though he is careful in that paper to say he "cannot prove
beyond reasonable doubt that fraud was involved" in CSH specifically absent
the raw data.

The subsequent joint paper with [[Dirk van der Marel]] ("Extended Comment on
*Nature* 586, 373 (2020) by E. Snider et al.," arXiv:2201.07686, published in
*International Journal of Modern Physics B*) analyzes the raw data Dias and
Salamat eventually posted and concludes: "For all 6 of the reported pressures
our analysis leads to the conclusion that: (i) the reported
background-corrected susceptibility data are pathological, (ii) they were not
obtained by the method described in this paper nor by any one of the
alternative 3 methods that were subsequently provided by the authors[,] and
(iii) the 'measured voltage' data are not raw data." The specific technical
finding is that the reported "superconducting signal" is the sum of a
smoothly-varying spline and a quantized (discretized) component that should
not be able to survive an honest subtraction of two independently noisy
measurements -- and that the correlations between the reported "raw" and
"corrected" data run in the direction predicted if the background was added
to a smooth, pre-existing target curve, not subtracted from an independent
measurement.

*provenance*: Hirsch, Physica C 590, 1353964 (2021), pre-proof (Tier 1);
Hirsch and van der Marel, arXiv:2201.07686v7 (Tier 1).

## Claim: The "data alteration and manipulation" quote is a joint Hirsch + Dirk van der Marel statement, not Hirsch alone -- correcting the earlier note's tentative "Reyer van der Marel" attribution -- but no Tier-1 primary carrying the exact wording was located this session

**Claim type:** direct quotation / attribution. Treated as load-bearing;
Tier 1-2 required. **Only Tier 2 met; flagged below.**

Chemistry World reports: "Hirsch, along with Dirk van der Marel at the
University of Geneva, then began a deeper investigation. Their analysis,
Hirsch says, showed the team could not have produced those results with the
method the paper described, or from the raw data they had obtained.
Furthermore, the duo stated, it was not possible to produce the team's
results 'without using procedures that can only be characterised as data
alteration and manipulation.'" This fixes two things the existing claim-note
left uncertain: the collaborator's actual first name is **Dirk**, not
"Reyer" (an error introduced in the 2026-07-10 cross-model audit), and the
quote is explicitly framed by the journalist as something "the duo stated"
jointly, not Hirsch's words alone.

What this session could NOT do: locate the exact phrase "data alteration and
manipulation" verbatim inside either joint Hirsch-van der Marel technical
paper read directly (the arXiv Extended Comment, or the Matter and Radiation
at Extremes paper "Incompatibility of published ac magnetic susceptibility of
a room temperature superconductor with measured raw data," 7, 048401, 2022,
whose abstract-only page was read but whose full text was not retrievable --
AIP's PDF endpoint 403'd). The word Science/AAAS's own reporter used for the
same joint finding was "pathological," not "data alteration and
manipulation" -- suggesting the exact wording may come from a statement made
directly to Chemistry World's journalist (Kit Chapman) rather than from
either published paper. Hirsch's own solo paper does use the near-identical
phrase "data alteration and manipulation" verbatim, but there it describes
the 2009 Debessai europium data specifically (Claim 2, above), not a joint
CSH-specific statement. **Flag: [unverified-quote -- exact wording only
located in a Tier-2 secondary; the joint primary statement, if one exists in
writing, has not been found.]**

*provenance*: Chemistry World, Kit Chapman, 2022-09-29 (Tier 2, direct quote,
receipted); cross-checked against Hirsch and van der Marel, arXiv:2201.07686
(Tier 1, mechanism present, exact phrase absent) and Science/AAAS, Eric Hand,
2022-09-26 (Tier 2, same finding paraphrased as "pathological").

## Claim: Hirsch's arXiv trouble is two distinct, now primary-confirmed events -- his own CSH-fraud paper was withdrawn by arXiv administrators in December 2021, and he was separately, temporarily banned from posting to arXiv in February 2022

**Claim type:** historical/biographical (dates, institutional action).
Tier 3-4 acceptable when uncontested; escalated here since the existing note
flagged this detail as resting only on Tier-4 Wikipedia. Now met at Tier 1
for the withdrawal and Tier 2 for the posting ban.

arXiv's own abstract page for Hirsch's paper (arXiv:2110.12854) states
directly: "This paper has been withdrawn by arXiv Admin, Submitted on 15 Oct
2021 (v1), last revised 9 Dec 2021 (this version, v2) ... Comments: arXiv
admin note: This submission has been withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to
a violation of professional communications standards." That is a distinct,
dated (Dec 2021) event confirmed directly on arXiv's own site -- not the
"~6-month ban" the earlier capture's Wikipedia sourcing described.

Separately, Science/AAAS reports a broader, later sanction: "In preprints,
Hirsch kept hammering on the Dias study — so forcefully that in February, he
was temporarily banned from posting to arXiv." Read in the article's own
September 2022 context, "February" is February 2022 -- two months after the
specific paper above was withdrawn. These are two different facts (one
paper's withdrawal in Dec 2021; a site-wide posting ban in Feb 2022) that the
prior capture had collapsed into one undated "~6-month ban," and both are now
independently sourced rather than resting on Wikipedia alone.

*provenance*: arXiv:2110.12854 abstract page (Tier 1, for the Dec 2021
withdrawal); Science/AAAS, Eric Hand, 2022-09-26 (Tier 2, for the Feb 2022
posting ban).

## Further leads

- Hirsch hosts a directory of his own papers at `jorge.physics.ucsd.edu/blockedarxiv/` (e.g. "How do you trust but verify hydride superconductivity?") -- the directory name itself is a primary trace of his account of being suppressed by arXiv; unexplored this session, worth its own capture.
- Dias sent "cease and desist" letters to van der Marel and to Hirsch's department chair and dean at UCSD, per Chemistry World -- a retaliation-against-critics angle distinct from the data-forensics story, unexplored.
- The University of Rochester ran two internal inquiries into the CSH work and "found no evidence of scientific misconduct," per Chemistry World -- an institutional-response contrast worth its own note (forensic critique proved substantially correct; the accused researcher's home institution cleared him twice).
- Dias's 2023 nitrogen-doped lutetium-hydride *Nature* paper (a separate, later room-temperature-superconductivity claim) was also retracted (Nov 2023) -- Chemistry World's own "third room temperature superconductivity paper retracted" headline confirms a pattern beyond the single 2020 CSH case; out of scope here but a natural next capture.
- The Hirsch/van der Marel "Incompatibility..." paper (Matter and Radiation at Extremes 7, 048401, 2022) full text was not retrievable this session (AIP's PDF endpoint 403'd; the mre.org.cn mirror gave abstract/metadata only) -- worth a retry, since it may be where the exact "data alteration and manipulation" phrasing originates in writing.

## Entity candidates

- Mathew Debessai — person — first author of the 2009 Europium PRL paper Hirsch treats as the confirmed precedent his CSH forensic method is modeled on; co-author of the 2020 CSH paper and, per Hirsch, the person who performed the CSH and Eu susceptibility measurements and taught Dias high-pressure technique. The earlier, foundational case this whole forensic-comparison argument rests on.
- Dirk van der Marel — person — condensed matter physicist, University of Geneva; Hirsch's co-author on the technical papers analyzing the CSH data, and joint speaker of the "data alteration and manipulation" quote this capture traces.
- Jorge E. Hirsch — person — already covered in the vault via [[claim-hirsch-invented-h-index-2005]]; this capture adds primary grounding to his forensic role.
- Ranga Dias — person — corresponding author of the retracted CSH paper and the later, separately-retracted lutetium-hydride paper.
- Ashkan Salamat — person — co-senior-author of the CSH paper; on record defending the work and criticizing Hirsch and van der Marel's conduct.
- Kit Chapman — person — Chemistry World journalist whose 2022-09-29 article is, per this session's search, the only located source carrying the exact "data alteration and manipulation" quotation.