May 28, 2002: First look at internal Schön investigations

Just after Memorial Day in 2002, our committee finally received the records of multiple internal Bell Labs investigations of the work of Hendrik Schön. The frustrating delay of several weeks in getting these documents was caused in part by the need to be sure that we had legal indemnification from Lucent for our activities. That being accomplished, we were ready to begin in earnest, and the documentation was weighty and troubling.

We received a large three-ring binder with a dozen or so sections dealing with various issues. In addition, we got copies of email correspondence with and about Hendrik, including management discussions about various issues. (There was no easy way to verify how complete the email collection was, but there was a lot there.)

Since these documents, including internal company communications, were made available as part of our official committee activities, I can't share them in detail, even now. But they illustrated serious concern among the Bell Labs managers, going back at least to the summer of 2001. Hendrik was strongly encouraged, for example, to help other researchers to reproduce his extraordinary dielectric films, and was told that it was more important to solidify his existing work than to demonstrate new breakthroughs.

This concern was not in evidence, however, in various public statements about the work, notably the "self-aligned monolayer field-effect transistor," or SAMFET, described in the fall of 2001. For example, a Business Week article quoted his recently appointed immediate manager John Rogers as if he had witnessed the assembly: "The whole thing just happens in a beaker at a chemistry bench." A Lucent press release included endorsements of the profound potential from his then third-level manager Cherry Murray ("Although there may be no practical applications for a decade, it could lead to a new paradigm in electronics") and second-level manager Federico Capasso ("The molecular-scale transistors that we have developed may very well serve as the historical 'bookend' to the transistor legacy started by Bell Labs in 1947." Ironically the word "bookend" was more appropriate than he seemed to realize.). Capasso is also reported to have told an internal Bell Labs meeting that it was OK if the work was not completely correct because it was so exciting that it would stimulate further work that would clarify what was going on.

During the same period, Hendrik's original mentor, Bertram Batlogg, continued to extol the earlier experiments on single-crystal organic semiconductors, even as he strongly questioned Hendrik's description in an unpublished document of the way the insulating film had been optimized.

There is a profound lesson in the fact that all of these fine scientists were willing to put aside their own misgivings and to publicly endorse Hendrik's results. I can't seriously entertain the idea that any of them the knew the results were faked and were deliberately misleading people. Instead, I have to believe that they had managed to deceive themselves that the problems were mistakes or misunderstandings, and that the groundbreaking work would stand the test of time even after these problems were resolved.

They were all wrong. The scientific world would have been better served if they had been more willing to openly question the honesty of their sincere young colleague.

May 24, 2002: What got the Schön investigation going?

Leading into the spring of 2002, there had been increasing discomfort with Hendrik Schön's stunning body of scientific results. The official investigation into his possible misconduct, however, only began when a group of nano-physicists noticed duplicated data in five papers. As described nicely in Eugenie Reich's book Plastic Fantastic, Lydia Sohn (then at Princeton), Paul McEuen, Leo Kouwenhoven, and Charleses Marcus and Lieber sent their findings to the Bell Labs management and to the journals where the articles were published at the beginning of May. It is interesting to speculate whether and how the investigation would have proceeded if it had been communicated less publicly.

During this period, a PowerPoint version of the slides was widely circulating in the nano community. The usual technique was to print out the graphs on transparencies and line them up, but I include them here as animated gifs for a change of pace. The figures show very similar curves, even though the data are represented as being taken from completely different samples. In principle this could happen once through gross negligence, by sending the wrong figure (with the wrong label!). In addition, however, the axes are sometimes differ in sign or by an integer multiplier, or they have some curves missing, which are much harder to understand. But the most damning evidence is that the small deviations from the curves are often very similar in different plots, even though this "noise" should vary each time the measurement is repeated.

For many researchers, seeing these images was all the evidence they needed that Schön had fabricated at least some of his data. Others held out hope that there was some innocent explanation, and looked to our "blue-ribbon panel" to resolve the issue. We on the committee felt a lot of pressure to get it right. But by this time ten years ago, we still hadn't yet gotten any detailed documentation from Lucent.

May 21, 2002: Investigating the Schön Affair

Ten years ago this week, Lucent Technologies announced that it had convened a panel to investigate possible scientific misconduct at Bell Labs. Interestingly, the story in the New York Times by Kenneth Chang featured the role of Bertram Batlogg, mentioning Hendrik Schön only in the final paragraph.

At the time, I thought this story missed the point, since it seemed clear that Schön was at the center of the problems. (Batlogg wasn't even an author on some of the papers in question.) But as Chang told me later, Batlogg had been highly visible when the spectacular "breakthroughs" were being announced. For this reason, Chang (who had covered the earlier work) thought that Batlogg's was the name that readers would be most likely to recognize, and not highlighting it would be a disservice to readers.

One of the biggest challenges to the committee (which I served on) was figuring out how to deal with Batlogg's role, neither assigning him primary responsibility nor minimizing his role.

Picturing Quantum Mechanics

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if those words are wrong?

Very cool recent experiments demonstrated a chemical reaction between molecules below a millionth of a degree (in Science, subscription required). My latest story for Physical Review Focus describes theoretical modeling of this reaction. We accompanied the story with this picture from the news release issued by the Joint Quantum Institute (a partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland), where the work was done.

It's a pretty picture, with its superhero color scheme and all, and it satisfies our need to avoid a solid block of text. But although it might not be a bad illustration of a room-temperature chemical reaction, it distorts much of what makes these ultra-low-temperature reactions special.

It's clear in the picture that two diatomic molecules are approaching each other, with dramatic consequences in store. The details of how the artist represents the bonds connecting a potassium and a rubidium atom in each molecule don't bother me too much. It doesn't match either of the customary representations, which are ball-and-stick models and the more accurate space-filling models, but there's no perfect way to represent something that can never be seen with visible light. Of course everyone knows that potassium atoms are green, but we'll let that slide, too.

The really problematic part of this picture is very difficult to avoid: the molecules really aren't anywhere, in the sense the picture conveys.

As first shown by experiments at Bell Labs in 1927, matter acts as waves as well as particles. At temperatures below a millionth of a degree, the relevant wavelength for these molecules is hundreds of nanometers, which is much, much larger than the separation of molecules shown in the experiment. There is no meaning to saying that these molecules are separated by such a short distance. They are simultaneously close and far away.

One way to think about this is to invoke Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. According to this principle, if you know an object's momentum with very high precision, you can't, even in principle, know its position very accurately. For these ultracold molecules, the momentum is almost zero, with very high precision, so you can only know where it is to the nearest hundreds of nanometers.

There's a second problem, too. The picture shows the molecules with particular orientations in space. That may not seem strange, but the molecules in the experiment were prepared in the rotational "ground state," with the lowest possible energy. Like the s-orbitals of electrons in a hydrogen atom, this state is spherically symmetrical. This means that the molecule is equally likely to be pointing in any direction. This isn't the same thing as saying we don't know what direction it's pointing (even though it does). Quantum mechanics says that it has no direction, at least until an experiment requires it to.

So the reacting molecules really aren't at any particular distance from one another, and they don't have any particular orientation relative to each other. That's one of the things that makes this chemical reaction--and the theoretical description of it--so interesting.

But good luck drawing that.

 

Anniversary of Hopping Paper

Thursday, January 14, 2010 is the 25^th anniversary of one of my first scientific papers, Hopping in Exponential Band Tails, in Physical Review Letters. It came out just as I arrived at Bell Labs.

It still surprises me that this paper has gotten nearly 200 citations, and that they continue to dribble in even now. Most papers are surpassed by new developments within a few years of publication. In this case, I stumbled on a useful but very accessible concept that people can easily wrap their head around. But I'd guess that most people that cite it have never read it.

The paper concerns motion of electrons in amorphous semiconductors, that is, semiconductors without a crystalline lattice. The best known example is the amorphous silicon alloys that are used for cheap solar cells.

Until the 1960s, some physicists questioned whether amorphous semiconductors could even exist (although they clearly did), because the quantum-mechanical understanding of semiconductors depended on the mathematical properties of wavelike electrons moving among the regularly-spaced atoms in a crystal. For electrons in some range of energies, the electron waves that diffract from the atoms destructively interfere, creating a bandgap with no electron states. At other energies, where there are electron states, they extend through the entire crystal. None of this mathematical framework for understanding semiconductors seemed to work unless the atoms were arranged in a regular crystal.

Phil Anderson, then at Bell Labs, showed in 1958 that if atoms were arranged in an irregular pattern, electronic states could exist, but be localized near particular atoms. Neville Mott and others suggested that in an amorphous semiconductors, electrons would be localized over some range of energies but extend infinite distances at higher or lower energies. The energies that separated the localized and extended states, which have the character of a phase transition, were called "mobility edges." If one conceptually replaces the band gap of crystalline semiconductors with the gap between mobility edges, then the mathematical treatment of amorphous semiconductors looks very familiar. Anderson and Mott shared the 1977 Physics Nobel with John van Vleck for their discoveries. Instead of being denigrated as "dirt physics," disorder is now a perennial topic in condensed matter physics

In Mark Kastner's group at MIT, we were studying what happened to optically generated electrons in the "band tails": the localized states near the mobility edge, whose number decreases exponentially into the gap. Based on some experiments I had done, I proposed that, at low temperatures, electrons would at first simply "hop" from one localized state to another, avoiding the extended states at the mobility edge altogether. Later on, as they moved to energies where the states where farther and farther apart, they would find it faster to hop up to where there were more states--but not all the way back to the mobility edge.

I called the energy to which electrons hopped--and where they could move easily--the "transport energy," and used a simple model to calculate how this energy varies with temperature.

If once conceptually replaces the band gap of crystalline semiconductors with the gap between transport energies, then the mathematical treatment of amorphous semiconductors looks very familiar. There are some important differences, though. For example, a magnetic field has a different effect on hopping electrons than on those that are freely moving. But although some details are different, the overall picture of amorphous semiconductors looks much like the pictures used by electrical engineers.

At the time, I was concerned that people would only remember Marc Kastner's name, so he graciously agreed to let me be sole author. I later regretted that selfishness, because anyone who knew Mark could see his style in it, and he certainly helped me to frame the ideas. Such are the follies of youth.

Ribosomes

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonath for their elucidation of the structure of ribosomes and how that structure promotes accurate translation of messenger RNA sequences into the amino acid sequences of proteins.

Ribosomes are the granddaddies of the ribonucleoprotein machines in the cell--big enough to be customarily granted organelle status even though they don't have a membrane. The bacterial version of the complex, for example consists of two large parts, denoted 30S and 50S to represent how fast they separate out of a suspension. Each of these subunits contains many proteins (20 and 33, respectively), together with large "ribosomal" RNA chains.

With the assistance of transfer RNA, ribosomes translate messenger RNA sequences (previously transcribed from DNA in the nucleus) into a corresponding amino-acid sequence or polypeptide, which will be folded and processed into a mature, functioning protein. In light of this critical and intricate task, it should probably not be surprising that the ribosome is very similar in widely different species. However, bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic ribosomes are rather different, and the differences in the ribosomal RNA were used by Carl Woese in the 1970s as the evidence for the highest-level classifying of life forms into these three broad domains.

Streptomycin, tetracycline, and about half of current antibiotics preferentially disrupt bacterial protein synthesis by attacking the bacteria-specific versions of the ribosome. The details of the ribosome structure can guide researchers who hope to develop new types of antibiotic molecules.

The three researchers and their collaborators all studied the structure of ribosomes by x-ray crystallography. This structure revealed specific details about how transfer RNA, with its individual matching amino acid cargo, nestles into the ribosome, and how the amino acid forms a covalent bond with the growing polypeptide. (The Nobel Committee notes that the charge-coupled devices that garnered this year's physics prize have made such studies much more productive.) Researchers have used these and other studies to clarify the entropy and energy that drives this synthesis.

A critical aspect of quality control in protein synthesis is the "proofreading" that ensures that the RNA sequence in the transfer RNA is indeed complementary to that of the messenger RNA. In 1974, John Hopfield (then at Princeton and Bell Labs) proposed that a multi-step ratchet that repeatedly checks the match while expending energy could be more selective than depending on the rather weak thermodynamic preference for a match. The increasingly refined structures revealed by the prize winners, together with other experiments, have confirmed how this proofreading works in the real ribosome, achieving an amazingly low error rate of about one error in 10,000 amino acids.

Optical Fiber

One half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Charles Kao for his contributions to the development of low-loss optical fiber.

Although free-space transmission had been proposed by Alexander Graham Bell (and such optical techniques as smoke signals and mirrors were used for communication even earlier) optical signals did not become technologically important until the 1970s. The laser provided the needed bright light source, but sending light beams through the air or evacuated tubes never became widespread. Optical fiber, by avoiding the natural spreading of the beams and by letting them be routed like electrical signals in a wire, made widespread optical communication, including undersea transmission, possible.

Many researchers contributed to the development of practical fiber. Early studies had demonstrated the principles of total internal reflection that allowed light to be guided down gently curving paths, and the usefulness of an outer cladding to keep light from leaking out into the surroundings. But in the late 1960s, the attenuation in optical fibers would have prevented signals from being sent more than a few tens of meters.

Charles Kao helped to elucidate intrinsic loss mechanisms in silica (SiO₂) fibers. Inherent density fluctuations in the fiber cause Rayleigh scattering, which increases for higher-frequency light (which is why the sky looks blue and the setting sun looks red). On the other side, low-frequency light is directly absorbed by atomic vibrations in the material. The best transmission occurs for intermediate frequencies where each of these processes is relatively unimportant, which for silica is in the near infrared region of the spectrum. If impurities could be removed from silica fibers, Kao showed, this material could be much clearer.

A major advance came from researchers at Corning, who in 1970 made very clear fibers using chemical-vapor deposition from very pure ingredients. This technique lowered the loss to a few dB per kilometer, making long-distance transmission feasible. Bell Labs later developed a modified deposition process that further reduced the loss from tiny amounts of residual hydrogen in the fibers. Previous prizes, like the Draper Prize, have often included the Corning and Bell Labs contributions to making fiber communication practical. Modern fibers have losses of around 0.2dB per kilometer, meaning that a very useful 1% of the original light power will travel 500km down the fiber, an astonishing degree of clarity for a solid material.

Researchers have explored many variations on the silica fiber over the years. For example, a single crystal core might reduce density fluctuations, while avoiding a material without oxygen would have fewer high-energy vibrations and less absorption. Cheaper materials like plastic can make useful fibers for carrying light over a few meters. But for long-distance transmission, no material has displaced the silica that was championed by Charles Kao.

Charge-Coupled Image Sensors

One half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics is shared by Willard Boyle and George Smith for the charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor. Smith says they invented the CCD in 1969 at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to give their semiconductor device organization leverage against a competing organization's magnetic bubble technology. (In a bit of Bell Labs dirty laundry, Gene Gordon says in this 2000 interview that he was originally listed with Boyle and Smith on the patent, and that he "never could understand why Bill Boyle was listed.") Although the magnetic technology never became important, the CCD became the mainstay of digital imaging for decades.

Electronic devices detect light when it liberates electrons, either into vacuum (as in a photomultiplier) or within a semiconductor. A key challenge is that these photogenerated electrons must outnumber the background "dark current." This becomes more difficult when light levels are low, as in many scientific experiments, or when individual pixels are made small so that they receive few photons. The CCD addresses this problem by electrically isolating the light-detecting region of the semiconductor from the detection circuitry, so it can accumulate electrons for seconds or longer if necessary. To read out the accumulated charge, the device uses a "bucket brigade" that efficiently passes the charge from detector to detector along a row. Circuitry at the end of the row measures the charge from each "bucket" in sequence as it arrives.

Since its invention, CCD technology has been used in thousands of scientific experiments, and it helped to establish the consumer digital camera industry. In the past decade or so, however, technologists have developed imagers based on the mainstream CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology by improving both the device design and the manufacturing process. These CMOS imagers are cheaper and can be integrated onto a single chip with the processing electronics, for which CMOS is standard. CCD technology is still preferred for the highest quality images and the lowest light levels, such as those in the Hubble space telescope.

Over the years, researchers have considered CCD technology as a replacement for CMOS in low-power electronics, but it has not had wide impact in that application.

The First Transistor

Over the weekend I helped guide some residents of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey (my home town), through the museum at Bell Labs (which is also in the town, although its postal address is Murray Hill). The free, publicly accessible lobby exhibit is an amazing testament to the many contributions that Bell Labs has made over the decades.

My personal favorite display is a replica of the original transistor, which was created in this very building (in the center of this google maps picture) in late 1947. It is amazing to think that there are billions of these electrical switches in the laptop that I'm typing this on, which cost me a few hundred dollars.

What was funny about showing this replica to non-experts, though, is that they naturally perceive it the way they do the other devices on display, as the carefully crafted product of finely-honed technology. In fact, the thing is a complete kluge.

It's easy to miss the scientific centerpiece of the whole apparatus: it's the silvery-gray slab sitting on top of the larger copper-colored slab. This is the semiconductor, in this case a piece of very pure germanium, which you can only make out in the picture because of a reflection from its somewhat ragged edge. Semiconductors, with their ability to morph from a metal-like conductor to an insulator and back again, are the materials that make the entire electronics industry possible.

The other key ingredient that you can't see is at the bottom of the clear triangle. That triangle itself is just a piece of plastic or something. The trick is that the experimenters wrapped some gold foil along its edge (probably more sloppily than in this replica). At the tip of the triangle, they then sliced the foil with a razor blade to form a very narrow gap, probably tens of microns in width, between two remaining pieces of foil. They connected the two pieces to separate parts of their electric circuit with the thin coiled wires you can see.

They then smushed the tip of the triangle, with its two almost-touching pieces of gold foil, into the surface of the semiconductor. To hold it in place, they fashioned a spring from the stiff wire, maybe a paper clip, that you see in the replica The final step is to connect their circuit to the copper-colored block, and thus to the semiconductor. So most of what you see in the picture is just there in a supporting role. The two pieces of foil, each touching the semiconductor, and the tiny gap between them, is where all the action is.

For electricity to get from one piece of foil to the other, it has to pass through the semiconductor. Applying an electrical signal to the base that supports the semiconductor, changes its properties, changing the amount of current that flows. The result is that a small signal on the base turns into a big change in current, so the signal is amplified. Even then, the current has trouble making it very far, which is why the gap has to be small. One of the first things the researchers did was to connect it to a speaker (like those in the telephones of their employer, Ma Bell) and verify that, yes, it sounded louder.

This rickety contraption is a classic experiment in progress. In fact, I'm confident that, at first, the real thing looked a lot messier than this replica. The scientists were throwing stuff together to see whether they could see the transistor action. If this hadn't worked they'd have thrown something else together, maybe with a narrower gap or a different metal, or washed the semiconductor differently.

To me, the ugliness of this device is its beauty. It's a snapshot of a discovery in progress.

 

Recent history note: The replica in the picture, unlike the one in the museum, was made for a 50^th anniversary celebration held at the Murray Hill facility in 1997. Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group, the name on the plaque, included both the integrated-circuit business and the optoelectronic-device businesses (not including optical fibers). Three years later, Lucent decided to spin that group off as Agere Systems, along with the people at Bell Labs (like me) whose work related to those businesses. (In a separate decision, they sold their optical fiber group and the associated Bell Labs members.) Within another few years, the optoelectronics business had been sold to Triquint, and much of it later became Cyoptics, while the IC business had been acquired by LSI. Most of the people from Bell Labs (like me) had already left. So it goes.

A Shrinking Target

Last week, Business Week published a lament from business consultant Adrian Slywotzky about declining industrial research in the U.S., and what we could do about it. The decline is not a revelation, but he's right to wonder where future technological innovations will come from.

I do think he exaggerates in describing Bell Labs as "essentially gone." For example, he claims that Bell Labs had 30,000 employees in 2001 and has only 1000 today (disclosure: my wife is one of the latter). Certainly the labs shrank after the dot-com bubble--as did the company that pays for them. But the 30,000 number included tens of thousands of people doing advanced development aligned with business--certainly not the sort of basic researchers Slywotzky is worried about replacing. Even when I went there in 1985, the research area at Bell Labs was not much over 1000.

Still, no honest observer could deny that Bell Labs is not what it used to be. But I think Slywotzky neglects a critical cause for changes at Bell and other research labs: the moves of their corporate parents away from vertical integration.

Like Ford, which in the 1920s bought Amazon rubber plantations to assure a supply for tires, the AT&T that spawned Bell Labs did everything. At the low end, they drew their own copper wire and developed durable plastic materials for telephones. At the high end, they provided both local and long-distance service to millions of Americans. With this vertically integrated structure, research didn't have to worry too much about what part of the company their innovations might affect. If it affected technology, AT&T could take advantage of it.

Even the 1984 breakup of local and long-distance didn't change this integration. It did remove the monopoly subsidy for Bell Labs, a name that AT&T kept. But to the surprise of many, it was the part of Bell Labs funded by the still-monopoly local phone companies, renamed Bellcore, that quickly ran into trouble. Bell Labs, although it became more focused, continued to pursue speculative long-term--or infinite-term--research.

When AT&T spun off Lucent Technologies in 1995, it kept many math and computer researchers, but physical science research was left largely intact as part of Bell Labs in the new company. But the company no longer provided phone services. When Lucent decided to spin off Optical Fiber Solutions and Agere Systems in 2000, they no longer made fiber, lasers, or integrated circuits. Bell Labs physical scientists were discouraged from research that supported these technologies (making Hendrik Schön's orthogonal work seem much more attractive). These spinoffs transformed the formerly vertically integrated company.

With the increasingly narrow vertical scope of Lucent's business (now merged with Alcatel but covering much the same product space) Slywotzky's description of material physics and semiconductor research as having been Bell Labs' "last remaining areas of basic science," seems misguided. For one thing, Bell Labs is still researching such things as using semiconductor chips to process light, which is certainly as basic as the introduction of the graphical user interface by Xerox PARC that he cites. But it is hardly surprising that a lab would shift its focus over time toward things the company actually does.

Although the shift is not surprising, the lack of vertical integration is a bigger challenge for long-term research. By definition, revolutionary innovations don't match well with existing businesses, so they face huge barriers in an established company. But in a smaller company that is focused on only one tier of activity, it's even easier for research to miss the mark, raising the pressure to shorten the time horizon. No innovation in semiconductor device physics, however profound, is going to help the bottom line of a telecommunications equipment manufacturer. The narrower the company's focus, the harder it is to argue that research has a chance of helping it.

I suspect IBM's much more vertically integrated model--they still manufacture integrated circuits as well as providing services--has helped IBM research to survive after a near-death experience in the early 1990s. Just last week, they revealed a very cool image of the organic molecule pentacene (ironically, one that was also studied by Hendrik Schön).

But although Slywotzky overlooks an important contributor to the decline, I agree with him that the U.S. and the world need to explore new ways to encourage long-term research.

 

Over the Wall

The Bell Labs I came to in 1985 was a mammoth enterprise, spanning activities from truly basic research to advanced development, while other parts of the company (then AT&T) made actual products.

Each of these activities was centered in distinct parts of the organization. One of the amusing consequences was the idea that once basic researchers found something useful, they figured they just had to "throw it over the wall." Ideally, it would hit some developer on the head. After rubbing the bruise, he (rarely she) would notice the shiny new object and figure out to make tons of money.

That was the theory.

Toward the end of my career, I spent a lot more time with developers, for example at the factory in Orlando where they perfected the processes that in a few years would create the next generation of integrated circuits. It was rather embarrassing to realize that these folks were not hanging out next to the wall, waiting to be hit on the head. In fact, they were far across the field, barely visible, working on the problems that really mattered to manufacturing. Back at the wall lay hundreds of rusting ideas, with no one paying the least attention.

I'm afraid this is a common problem among academic scientists, as well. They get grants for research related to some economically important field, but often they never take the time to learn the real issues, and talk to the people that understand them. So they devise elegant solutions for exciting, unimportant problems, often the same problems over and over, while engineers do the real work. (The analogous problem in biomedicine is the need for "translational" research.)

A perennial example is ultrasmall transistors. Of course Moore's law demands that transistors get ever smaller. But smallness is not the end goal. Smallness is related to low power and to high speed, but these don't come for free; they must be directly addressed. Moreover, a small transistor is useful only if it can be packed very densely with other small transistors. A single, really small transistor every millimeter or so is not solving any important problem. Finally, making anything like a modern chip requires billions of transistors with virtually none failing. For all these reasons, making a single, isolated, slow, wasteful transistor is just irrelevant.

Of course, every so often one of those crazy, disconnected ideas changes the world.

My Regret

I spent much of the summer of 2002 looking into allegations of scientific misconduct against Jan Hendrik Schön, who had until then been a golden boy of organic semiconductor research at Bell Labs. I was part of a five-person "blue ribbon" committee headed by Mac Beasley of Stanford, which also included Supriyo Datta of Purdue, Herwig Kogelnik of Bell Labs, and Nobel-prizewinner Herb Kroemer of UCSB. In the end, we found the evidence compelling that many of Hendrik's results were fictitious or deceptive, putting a rather definitive asterisk on his meteoric career. The investigation was at times dispiriting, but in the end highly satisfying, in that we were able to help purge the scientific literature and community of some highly erroneous results. I certainly don't regret the time and effort I put into the investigation.

As described in Eugenie Samuel Reich's recent book, Plastic Fantastic (Amazon, B&N), however, I was involved in allegations earlier, in the fall of 2001. Specifically, when Hendrik moved from organic crystals to molecular-gate length transistors, his claims began to violate known laws of transistor physics, drawing a great deal of critical attention. My colleagues and I at Agere Systems, who had recently been spun out from Bell Labs, had many serious questions about the results, as did researchers within Bell Labs and elsewhere. I arranged a special seminar by Hendrik, at which Ashraf Alam noticed that some data were unreasonably smooth. Further investigation (described in technical detail in our final committee report, p. E-39) showed that there it was almost inconceivable that the data could come from real samples: it had to have been made up (not merely massaged so it looked better). This wasn't the only problem, just the hardest one to explain away as sloppiness or ignorance.

At this point I started heavy discussions with managers at Bell Labs, as described in Reich's book. Why did I not make it public, as others did with the copied data that started the formal investigation in April? Two main reasons: First, I thought there was a small chance I was wrong, and that a public allegation would still have lasting consequences and be hard to withdraw, so it would be best to check first if there was an innocent explanation. Second, the consequences for Bell Labs looked to be so severe that I thought the managers (whom I knew personally from my days at Bell Labs) deserved a chance to do some damage control (I didn't intend to help in any cover-up, of course).

I don't regret the decision to first raise the issue privately. What I regret was my response when Hendrik concocted an "explanation" for the smoothness, claiming that the histogram bars were so wide as to obscure data that were less smooth. At that point I emailed the managers saying that I considered the issue "CLOSED." That was a mistake. In reality, I still felt strongly that there was something horribly wrong, although there was a tiny patch of daylight in an otherwise airtight case for intentional fraud. (And as discovered by a Bell Labs manager months later, Hendrik's explanation was itself provably fraudulent.) I had seriously underestimated how willing the Bell managers would be to threaten the goose that had laid so many golden eggs for them. By removing my charge from the table, I gave them the excuse to delay a serious inquiry for another five months, during which Hendrik's false claims would continue to divert good researchers as well as job offers and prizes. That is my regret.

In 2006 I gave an hour-plus-long talk on this subject at Cornell's Center for Nanoscale Systems. Video is here.