Room-temperature superconductivity — or not? Comment on Nature 586, 373 (2020) by E. Snider et al.

Recently, the discovery of room-temperature superconductivity was announced for a carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) under high pressure [E. Snider et al., Nature 586, 373 (2020)]. The evidence for superconductivity was based on resistance and magnetic susceptibility measurements. In the figures showing the susceptibility it was stated that “the background signal, determined from a nonsuperconducting CSH sample at 108 GPa, has been subtracted from the data”. From a thorough data analysis we show that the data are incompatible with the notion that the susceptibility data are obtained from the “measured voltage” using a background correction. On the other hand, the data are compatible with the reverse procedure, namely the “measured voltage” is obtained by adding a “background signal” containing noise to what was reported as the background-corrected susceptibility. For all six of the reported pressures our analysis leads to the conclusion that: (i) the reported background-corrected susceptibility data are pathological, (ii) they were not obtained by the method described in this paper nor by any one of the alternative three methods that were subsequently provided by the authors and (iii) the “measured voltage” data are not raw data.