IISER Pune Puts Dent On IISc’s Superconductivity Claims

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune says that it did not find any signs of superconductivity in gold-silver nanostructured thin film samples that they prepared in the lab reports The Hindu.

The revelation comes in light of the recent claims made by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru researchers Dev Kumar Thapa and Prof. Anshu Pandey. The preprint results were posted in the arXiv server on 3 September. The preprint posted at arXiv is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Gold-Silver nanostructured films were grown at room temperature and in vacuum (about 10-6 mBar) by alternate deposition of gold and silver on crystalline silicon and quartz substrates. The films was deposited using a pulsed-laser-deposition technique than the one used by the IISc team. Gold and silver were deposited sequentially, with more gold deposited than silver, for about 100 times so that the total film thickness is about 80-100 nanometres.

“Our intent was not to try and compare our material with theirs. The IISc team claims to have found superconductivity using gold-silver nanostructured material. So we made nanostructured thin films of gold and silver using a very different technique,” The Hindu quoted Professor Satishchandra Ogale from the Department of Physics and Centre for Energy Science at IISER, Pune.

“Though the state of our sample could be very different from the IISc study, the material used is the same and it is nanostructured too. And we did not observe any superconductivity.” said Professor Ogale.