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Reposted by Vincent Mourik

Sergey Frolov🇺🇦 @spinespresso.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

The rarest of sights - a big glossy journal publishing negative replications! Yes, we had to bundle 4 replications into one article AND we had to wait 2 (!!) years in peer review, but here we are: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Data sharing helps avoid “smoking gun” claims of topological milestones

Manipulating the topology of electronic bands can realize new states of matter, with possible implications for information technology. A central question is how to tell whether a topological regime ha...

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Reposted by Vincent Mourik

Tom Radcliffe @tjradcliffe.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

If publishing null results was a problem in my old field (physics beyond the Standard Model) there would have been, like, three papers in the past 30 years.

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Reposted by Vincent Mourik

Toma Susi @mostlyphysics.net · 08/01/2026

Kudos to Science – and of course Sergey and others like him who are holding their own fields accountable. That is how science progresses.

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Reposted by Vincent Mourik

Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (July)

Bitter fight over 2020 Microsoft quantum paper both resolved and unresolved
--The Register, 31 Jul 2025

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Freud's chuckling in the afterlife I suppose

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Where's the commemorative plague recounting the events that took place at this historic spot?

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Yes, I was specifically alluding to your almost indefinite patience.

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

@craiggidney.bsky.social If a technically versed reader needs to put in this much effort to understand a major caveat in a paper, that paper is misleading. The paper should be updated to fix this. Too bad published papers petrify and cannot be touched by mortal physicists.

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Reposted by Vincent Mourik

Sergey Frolov🇺🇦 @spinespresso.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

I notice in my community numerous conferences featuring fraudsters. Along with people who stated that it's time to move on, and the lesson has been learned etc. Of course people who called out fraud are typically excluded. I wonder if other communities went through this and have they survived?

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

There is no reliability nor safety in dealing with these people. 50/end

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Summarizing: this nat com paper and the nat nano paper represents a decade of scientific malpractice, toxicity, intimidation, harassment, cover-up and plain retaliation at QuTech and TU Delft. Throughout all this I was a PhD student, post-doc and right now I am on a tenure track. 49/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Vandersypen reach out to the leadership at my current employer, calling me an obstructionist and asking them to talk with me. I am still on a tenure track. 48/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

A few months later, after I publicly questioned Kouwenhoven / TU Delft's lobby of the Dutch government in the lead-up to the founding of QuantumDeltaNL (of which Delft got the lion's share of many many millions), Vandersypen retaliated against me. 47/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Within a few weeks of his reinstatement as a full prof at TU Delft, right after the appearance of a scathing report of the Dutch educational inspection of toxic culture and social unsafety at Delft, Kouwenhoven harassed me at a conference we both attended. One of his team members did the same. 46/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Io and behold, without an open integrity investigation against Kouwenhoven, the way was paved for his rehire as a distinguished professor at Delft University of Technology... Sidenote: Vandersypen used to be post-doc in Kouwenhoven's team, and was groomed by him for a leadership position. 45/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

to the Delft integrity committee for possible integrity violations regarding the nat com and nat nano papers (as if such a report can be unseen by an integrity committee...), upon which Tim van der Hagen and his board decided there was no longer a ground for the integrity investigation. 44/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

The other two being the ones related to the two retracted Nature papers. Here's the deal. Summer 2024, Lieven Vandersypen gets his final acquittal from the board, headed by Tim van der Hagen, of our complaint against him for not sharing data. Just prior to that, Vandersypen revoked his report 43/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Parallel to this, based on our reports and suggestions, QuTech director Lieven Vandersypen had no choice but to make a report to the Delft integrity committee for possible integrity concerns regarding these two papers. This was a third integrity investigation into Kouwenhoven et al. 42/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

We went through a years long process of peer review of our criticism. I'm very relieved to no longer be an author on this piece of scientific malpractice and its nonsensical correction with perpetual editorial expression of concern. 41/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

During this time I also asked corresponding author Önder Gül if he knew of the data manipulations at the time in 2016, to which he responded affirmatively, see the science news piece. 40/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Together with Sergey Frolov and Kun Zuo, we wrote an extensive analysis, which we submitted to the journal in December 2021, together with a request for removal of authorship in the case of myself and Kun Zuo. zenodo.org/records/6325... 39/n

zenodo.org

Post-publication review of Zhang et al. Nature Communications 2017

This post publication review (written memorandum and supporting slides) critique the published claims of Zhang et al, Nature Communications 2017, based on published data and additional data shared wit...

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

I did get access to the full nature communications data in summer 2021, in my capacity as a co-author. I started analysing these and I found many undisclosed data manipulations, all to the effect of hiding unwanted features and propping conductance values up to the desired quantized value. 38/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

This included a complaint against head of the board of the University Tim van der Hagen for his role in the obstruction of data sharing. Needless to say that all these complaints went nowhere. Throughout this time, Kouwenhoven et al started engaging with the journals on their own terms. 36/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

We went to the QuTech director, Lieven Vandersypen, with our data requests. He refused. We confronted him with the Netherlands Code of Conduct saying that materials should be shared for verification and reproduction. We didn't hear from him, we complained against him and other Delft officials. 35/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Kouwenhoven never responded to our data requests. After the summer in 2020, the integrity committee told us we were no longer a part in their investigation, nor would they investigate any additional papers, as the board had confined their scope to a single paper. 34/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

This is when @tudelft.nl comes into play. As soon as we first heard from the Delft integrity committee, we pointed out to them that we suspected a pattern of multiple unreliable papers from Kouwenhoven's lab. And we requested access to the data behind these. All this was early June 2020. 33/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

and Leo Kouwenhoven et al on Quantized Majorana Conductance, which led to its retraction. I got very worried about the two papers discussed in this thread, after all, although I was a co-author on one of them, I had never seen the underlying data and I had always been doubtful of the claims 32/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

the work better, to which he never responded. Anyway, both manuscripts eventually made it through peer review and got published - see links above. Fast forward to early 2020, when @spinespresso.bsky.social and myself had just unconvered data falsification in the 2018 Nature paper of Hao Zhang 31/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

I was dropped off the Nature Nanotechnology paper, I was ok with that as I was very uneasy with that entire part of the work. This was communicated to me via an email asking me for my opinion on the manuscript by corresponding author Önder Gül. I did ask him again to see full data to understand 30/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

I remained co-author on the nat com paper. I didn't question anything seriously about it, because 1) I didn't dare to, given my earlier experience with Kouwenhoven, and 2) I wasn't aware of data manipulations that came to light later. I still felt uneasy about the claim of large mean free path 29/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Next, the corresponding authors decided to split the manuscript. Nat coms became about claiming 'ballistic superconductivity', a term coined to describe cleaner devices with better interfaces. Nat Nano was about better Majorana evidence based on these improvements. 28/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Anyway, the manuscript got submitted to nat nano, the referees were very critical largely echoing my own internal criticism from a few months earlier, editors rejected, corresponding authors appealed, but editors kept their ground. I was relieved. 27/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

When I got the rejection letter of the grant a few months later, it contained the explicit phrasing ‘The committee felt that the reference letters were somewhat reserved and not overwhelming.’ This prompted me to decide never to ask Kouwenhoven again for a reference. 26/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

as I pretty much knew I was blowing my chances. In hindsight I should not have asked him for this letter any more. While I have not been able to independently verify this, from hearsay he was talking diminutively to other group members about my proposal while not giving me any feedback. 25/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

There is another complicating factor here. This episode happened one week after my PhD defense. I needed a reference letter from Kouwenhoven for a postdoctoral fellowship with a deadline later that month, and I had already asked him to supply this letter. Of course I was very worried about this 24/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

When I then asked more questions, he never responded again. This is the same person quoted in the Science news piece above, but also the person who conducted what I call theory gymnastics as part of the correction in the same news piece. 23/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

So I decided to ask clarifying questions to Michael Wimmer, the theoretician in charge. He responded: 'Essentially you shouldn't trust numbers too much, but only see it as a trend. ' and ‘I know that the interpretation of the numerics is on the border of what's acceptable.' 22/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

...gathered in the years before pointed at a few hundred nanometers mean free path. Suddenly a basic nanowire property had improved by an order of magnitude, and this was measured in junctions of ~100 nm length, itself an order of magnitude less than the claimed effect. Was this even physical? 21/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

An important contentious point for me was the correspondence between numerical model and experimental data. Because the outcome of comparing the two, according to the manuscript, was that the mean free path in the nanowires might be up to 10 micrometers, while all independent evidence... 20/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

This first version of these manuscripts mentioned above can still be found on arxiv as a v1 - I was dropped as a co-author on the later versions that became the Nat nano paper. arxiv.org/abs/1603.040... 19/n

arxiv.org

Ballistic Majorana nanowire devices

Majorana zero modes are quasiparticles emerging at the boundary of a topological superconductor. Following proposals for their detection in a semiconductor nanowire coupled to a superconductor, severa...

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

but wrote explicitly to Kouwenhoven, and separately to Gül and Zhang, that I did not agree with the paper's narrative. I did not have the faintest suspicion at the time that I was looking at manipulated paper figures all along - we never made it to the checking-the-analysis stage. 18/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

...seriously discuss with him. The outcome was that 1) I never got to see any additional data but the paper figures, despite my requests for this, 2) I did not dare to keep criticizing 3) I did not dare to even take my name off the manuscript 4) I compromised: I gave green light for submission 17/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

All the samples and all the data in this article come from your successors and you will have to accept that you are no longer central.' Kouwenhoven requested a video call with me. I was scared and accepted to talk, I was already mentally wasted after a few very stressful days and not able to... 16/n

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Vincent Mourik @vincentmourik.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

'From all the other coauthors I get only positive and constructive comments. I had already suspected that you would be an exception and hence I sent you another separate email.' and 'Vincent, you must also accept that others have now taken over and must be given the space... 15/n

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