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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in 2001 as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, which was later rescinded.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. ==Rise to prominence== Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997 he was hired by Bell Labs, located in New Jersey, USA. 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. In 2001 he was listed as an author on an average of one newly published research paper every eight days.〔 In that year he announced in ''Nature'' that he had produced a transistor on the molecular scale. Schön claimed to have used a thin layer of organic dye molecules to assemble an electric circuit that, when acted on by an electric current, behaved as a transistor. The implications of his work were significant. It would have been the beginning of a move away from silicon-based electronics and towards organic electronics. It would have allowed chips to continue shrinking past the point at which silicon breaks down, and therefore continue Moore's Law for much longer than is currently predicted. It also would have drastically reduced the cost of electronics. A key element in Schön's claimed successful observation of various physical phenomena in organic materials was in the transistor setup, specifically, a thin layer of aluminium oxide which Schön incorporated in the transistors using lab-facilities of the University of Konstanz in Germany. Although the equipment and materials used were commonly used by laboratories all over the world, no one succeeded in preparing aluminium oxide layers of similar quality as claimed by Schön.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Schön scandal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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