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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 livermorium and oganesson (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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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