Accelerator shutdown leads to paper being retracted

Scientific papers get retracted all the time for problems ranging from honest mistakes to outright fraud. The most common reason for discovering a problem is a failure to produce similar data as part of a follow-up experiment. Today's issue of Science contains a retraction that came about because key work couldn't be reproduced, as the facility in which it was done has shut down.

The original work was published back in 2006, and is rather interesting. Covalent bonds between atoms have the ability to stretch and contract, creating vibrations between the atoms. These vibrations can be excited by light of specific wavelengths—absorbing the right photon will set the bond vibrating. The paper claimed to be the first to show that it was possible to hit a silicon-hydrogen bond with enough photons that the vibration would be sufficient to break the bond, releasing the hydrogen from a silicon surface. In short, the results suggested that it's possible to vibrate a molecule to pieces.

For whatever reason, at least one of the authors has recently attempted to obtain similar results, presumably as part of a new but related project. And the author couldn't. The appropriate response in that case is to go back and try to replicate the conditions of the original experiment as exactly as possible. And again, the author couldn't—in this case, because the facility had been shut down in the intervening years: "the free electron laser facility at Vanderbilt, a unique light source for this experiment, has shut down, prohibiting further research." So the authors did the appropriate thing and retracted their earlier paper.