Jan Hendrik Schön

The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born August 1970 in Verden an der Aller, Lower Saxony, Germany) who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, both of which were later rescinded.

The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud.

Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997 he was hired by Bell Labs, located in New Jersey, United States. There, he worked on electronics in which conventional semiconducting elements (such as silicon) were replaced by crystalline organic materials. Specific organic materials can conduct electrical currents, and in a so-called field-effect transistor (a refined implementation of the transistor effect, which was pioneered in 1947 in the same laboratory) the conductance can be switched on or off, a basic function in the field of electronics. Schön, however, claimed spectacular on/off behavior, far beyond anything achieved thus far with organic materials. His measurements in most cases confirmed various theoretical predictions, for example that the organic materials could be made to display superconductivity or be used in lasers. The findings were published in prominent scientific publications, including the journals Science and Nature, and gained worldwide attention. However, no research group anywhere in the world succeeded in reproducing the results claimed by Schön.

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