Victor Ninov

Victor Ninov (; born June 27, 1959) is a Bulgarian physicist and former researcher who worked primarily in creating superheavy elements. He is known for the co-discoveries of elements 110, 111, and 112 ( darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium, respectively).

Ninov also claimed the creation of elements 116 and 118 (now livermorium and oganesson); however, an investigation conducted by the University of California, Berkeley concluded that he had falsified the evidence. The repercussions of the affair had an impact on the guidelines of conduct for several research institutions.

Early life

Victor Ninov was born in Bulgaria in 1959. He grew up in the capital city of Sofia. In the 1970s, when Ninov was a teenager, he and his family left for West Germany; they bounced around from house to house. Shortly after the move, Victor's father went missing; he was found dead six months later in the Bulgarian foothills due to causes unknown.

Career

Victor Ninov attended Technische Universität Darmstadt near Frankfurt, Germany. Here, he distinguished himself as a very capable physicist: he was particularly good at building scientific instruments and coding analysis programs for them.

This landed him a job at the nearby German research center GSI (''Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung''), where he worked on his doctorate and postdoctoral work of creating new elements.

For his expertise, he was given sole control of the computer analysis program. Here, he became a rising star by co-discovering darmstadtium (element 110), roentgenium (element 111), and copernicium (element 112) by smashing ion beams into heavy elements using GSI's UNILAC (a type of particle accelerator) and analyzing the debris. Though an investigation later determined that these discoveries of element 110 and 112 included fabricated samples created by Ninov, additional evidence of the experiment was confirmed to be untampered with, rendering his co-discovery legitimate. These discoveries were made with the help of his addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for.

He worked at Stanford University for a time. He was hired at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1996 as a world class expert for particle accelerator debris sensors, and analysis programs.

Fraud investigation

While working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Victor Ninov and his team pursued a hypothesis by Robert Smolańczuk, then a visiting fellow from Poland on a Fulbright scholarship, that element 118 could be formed at relatively low energies by smashing ⁸⁶Kr and ²⁰⁸Pb isotopes together. This hypothesis was dubbed "Robert's magic recipe", and it was highly controversial at the time. Ninov initially doubted the hypothesis he was pursuing; he is quoted as saying, "We didn't know how many orders of magnitude he molańczukwas wrong".

As in some earlier research projects, Ninov held sole control of the data analysis program (LBNL's was called ''GOOSY''), and he was the only one on the team who knew how to use it. In 1999, Ninov and his team reported sightings of element 118, almost exactly as in Smolańczuk's hypothesis, and a decay chain that also produced element 116. However, other laboratories were unable to reproduce the results.

Eager to prove their discovery, the team double-checked their instruments, and tried again. One more sighting was made by Ninov, but it was dismissed by a colleague, and a full formal investigation was held to find out what had happened. The original element 118 data was independently analysed; in the original binary data, there was no indication of the presence of element 118 or 116. The investigation dragged on for a year, until it was concluded that "Ninov ... intentionally misled his colleagues—and everyone else—by fabricating data".

Ninov, who had been placed on leave for the investigation, was fired. The rest of Ninov's team officially retracted their claims in 2002. There was also an investigation conducted into Ninov's previous unsupervised science at GSI; it was found that "two sightings were spuriously created" (one of element 110 and another of element 112). However these false sightings were found amongst a large amount of real data that still supported his co-discoveries of elements 110 and 112. The GSI investigation concluded that the discovery of those elements was legitimate.

The superheavy elements 116 and 118 were eventually discovered and verified in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia from 2000–2002. These elements were named livermorium and oganesson respectively. In 2010, some of the nuclides that were originally claimed as decay products of element 118 were truly synthesized at LBNL; the 2010 observations did not match the claimed 1999 data.
Ninov has continued to maintain that he was innocent.

Impact on the scientific community

The reports of the investigation came as quite a shock to other scientists, as Ninov had previously been regarded as a very respected physicist. He was so respected that Albert Ghiorso, a physicist who had part in the discovery of 12 elements and a close collaborator of Glenn Seaborg, once called Ninov "a younger version of himself". In the aftermath of the investigation, it was troubling to many that so many co-authors on LBNL's 1999 papers had contributed to a false statement while apparently unaware that it was false. The Ninov affair resulted in stricter guidelines being set for coauthors; these rules "clarify co-authors' roles and duties" and include "requiring all coauthors to vouch for their contribution to published work".

The American Physical Society has also called for increased ethical training and oversight at research institutions, and has sponsored several speakers in an effort to make the scientific community more comfortable and resilient to scientific fraud. Reports on the Ninov affair were released around the same time as the final report on the Schön affair, another major incident of data falsification in physics, and this amplified its impact.

Personal life

Ninov is retired from physics. For a time, he worked as a professor of physics at the University of the Pacific, but it is said that he now holds an engineering job in California, where he currently lives. His wife, Caroline Cox, a former history professor at University of the Pacific, died in 2014 of cancer. They were married for 23 years. Ninov had helped her finish her book, ''Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution'', and it was published posthumously. He is an avid sailor, and pilots a four-seat plane, an Aero Commander.

See also

* List of experimental errors and frauds in physics
* List of scientific misconduct incidents
* Schön scandal
* Hwang scandal

References

External links

Observation of Superheavy Nuclei Produced in the Reaction of 86Kr with 208Pb
– Communication in "Physical Review Letters" stating observation of the element 118 published by Victor Ninov's research group


Copy of a ''New York Times'' article on the Ninov controversy


An essay about V. Ninov's career

The Man Who Tried to Fake an Element
Documentary about Ninovium and the Ninov controversy

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ninov, Victor
Living people
1959 births
Academic scandals
American nuclear physicists
American people of Bulgarian descent
Bulgarian nuclear physicists
People involved in scientific misconduct incidents
University of California, Berkeley staff
Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni
Oganesson
Livermorium