The Quantum Hall Effect—in Pentacene?

Organic materials have long held promise as possible inexpensive semiconductors in field‐effect transistors (FETs) for electronic circuits. No one, however, had dreamed that one might use them to create a two‐dimensional gas of electrons or holes and with it to study fundamental electronic behavior. Thus, Bertram Batlogg of Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, stunned an audience at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Minneapolis by showing textbook curves of the fractional and integer quantum Hall effects and of an apparent metal‐insulator transition—all seen in FETs made with tetracene and pentacene (chains of four and five benzene rings, respectively).

The following news story reports on work that has since been discredited. An independent committee commissioned by Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, found evidence of scientific misconduct in the papers on which it was based (see Physics Today, November 2002, page 15 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1534995 ). The authors have withdrawn the papers in questions.