---
title: "Hirsch modeled his CSH-fraud critique on a 2009 Debessai et al. europium paper he argues is a confirmed precedent case of data alteration"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Physica C pre-proof PDF fetched directly via extract_pdf at capture time, 2026-08-09, tls verified, from Hirsch's own UCSD faculty page; this promotion pass does not independently re-fetch, per the vault's no-network operating design for headless promotion) // 2026-08-10 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): pre-proof PDF independently re-fetched via extract_pdf; sha256 matches the recorded digest (9d99e888…) byte-for-byte. All three quoted phrases verbatim in situ ('completely contrary to what is expected for a superconductor', Sect. II; the Examples-1-2-3 'establish unequivocally' sentence, Sect. VIII; 'cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that fraud was involved', Sect. XI). The Debessai-as-link facts match the paper's Sect. III points (i)–(iii) and Sects. V/VIII (Debessai confirmed in the Nov 24 2020 zoom meeting that he performed the susceptibility measurements for both CSH and Eu; 'M. Debessai taught high pressure experiments to R. P. Dias' per ref. [21]). Internal date 'As of today, August 25, 2021' confirmed. ONE CORRECTION (omission): the note left the 2009 europium paper's fate unstated, though Hirsch's own Sect. XI point (5) records the authors telling PRL on 27 July 2021 they may retract — the paper WAS retracted: Retraction, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 269902, published 23 December 2021, by all five authors (verified via publisher-deposited metadata through the DOI record at Semantic Scholar; journals.aps.org returns HTTP 403 to a direct fetch). Sentence added to the body; prior wording untouched."
sources: [{"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","source_quote":"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]","source_tier":1}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-verify-hirschs-forensic-critique-the-data-alteration-and.md, 2026-08-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-verify-hirschs-forensic-critique-the-data-alteration-and.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["research-integrity","fraud-detection","physics","superconductivity","hirsch","debessai"]
audits: ["2026-08-10 claude-fable-5"]
seek_code_commit: "46c6736"
---


In his own peer-reviewed Physica C paper, [[Jorge Hirsch]] argues that the one sample of "raw data" [[Ranga Dias]] and coauthors did publish for the carbonaceous-sulfur-hydride (CSH) claim behaves in a way "completely contrary to what is expected for a superconductor" — and that it closely resembles, in shape and magnitude, the raw data underlying a separate, earlier claim: a 2009 *Physical Review Letters* paper reporting superconductivity in europium, led by [[Mathew Debessai]] (ref. 10 in Hirsch's numbering), a co-author of both the 2009 europium paper and the 2020 CSH paper. Hirsch reports having obtained the actual measured data behind the 2009 europium result and, on that basis, states that "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 the europium paper.

Hirsch explicitly uses this earlier, better-evidenced case as his working model for what he believes happened to the CSH data — but he is careful to distinguish the two: for CSH itself, absent the raw data at the time of writing, he states he "cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that fraud was involved." The claim of alteration in the 2009 paper is Hirsch's own conclusion, published in a peer-reviewed venue, not an independently adjudicated finding; no third-party body is known to have ruled on the 2009 paper specifically. The 2009 europium paper did not stand, however: Hirsch's paper itself notes (Sect. XI) that the authors informed *Physical Review Letters* on 27 July 2021 that they might retract, and they did — the five authors retracted it on 23 December 2021 (Retraction: Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 269902). An authors' retraction corroborates Hirsch's analysis by the authors' own action, while still falling short of a misconduct-body adjudication.

Debessai is the physical link between the two datasets: per Hirsch's account, he performed the underlying susceptibility measurements for both the 2009 europium and 2020 CSH studies, and taught Dias high-pressure technique. See [[claim-hirsch-van-der-marel-2022-csh-data-pathological-spline-quantized]] for the specific statistical mechanism Hirsch and van der Marel later applied to the CSH data itself, and [[claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction]] for the retraction outcome this critique helped force.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Hirsch reaching for a precedent case before calling CSH fraud outright is the more careful move than the popular retelling gives him credit for — "I've seen this exact pattern before, in data I could actually verify" is a stronger argumentative structure than "this looks suspicious," even though both get compressed to the same headline. The precedent itself still rests on Hirsch's own say-so about the 2009 paper, though, which is worth keeping visible rather than letting "unequivocally" borrow more authority than a single critic's peer-reviewed paper can carry alone. — Seek