[12][13] Dias founded a company related to his superconductivity interests, Unearthly Materials, which made misleading claims about its funding and investors.
[21][15] In January 2017, together with Silvera, Dias (then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University) reported the creation of solid metallic hydrogen using a diamond anvil cell.
These materials exhibit fundamental changes in their properties, potentially leading to the discovery of novel phenomena and exotic states of matter that do not exist under normal conditions.
[13] An extensive Research Misconduct Investigation, conducted by the University of Rochester at the request of the National Science Foundation, uncovered multiple evidence for Research Misconduct, including verbatim text and figure plagiarism in a NSF grant application and multiple instances of data falsification and fabrication.
[41][42] Marvin L. Cohen, National Medal of Science recipient and former president of the American Physical Society, was also an early voice pointing out problems with the carbonaceous sulfur hydride paper.
This finding undermines confidence in the claim that any of the experimental evidence reported in those papers reflects the properties of real physical samples of CSH.
"On July 25, 2023, it was announced that a 2021 paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL) on which Dias was a co-author would be retracted due to suspected data fabrication.
[48] On September 26, 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the coauthors of the N-doped lutetium hydride Nature paper[31] were requesting a retraction, alleging Dias of misrepresenting data.
[49] On November 7, 2023 Nature formally retracted the paper in question,[31][50] with the statement indicating that "... request of the authors Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Elliot Snider, Raymond McBride, Hiranya Pasan, Dylan Durkee, Sachith E. Dissanayake, Keith V. Lawler and Ashkan Salamat."
"[50] Commenting in Physics World about Dias and the controversy surrounding his superconductivity work, physicist Lilia Boeri said his "inconsiderate behaviour has harmed the reputation of the field".
[53] In March 2023, a reporter for Quanta Magazine found a 2021 YouTube talk in which Dias claimed that Unearthly Materials had raised $20 million and listed investors that included the CEOs of OpenAI and Spotify.
[4][54] In April 2023, the journal Science reported at least 21% of Dias's 2013 doctoral thesis, supervised at Washington State University, had been identified as copied from uncredited sources, including the 2007 doctoral thesis of James Hamlin, at Washington University in St. Louis, in addition to parts of a 1999 paper of his PhD adviser, Choong-Shik Yoo.
[55][7] Analysis of Dias's thesis by Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, also indicated plagiarism.