Victor Ninov

Victor Ninov ( Bulgarian Виктор Нинов ; * 1959 in Sofia , Bulgaria ) is a Bulgarian physicist and nuclear researcher.

Victor Ninov studied at the University of Darmstadt and received his doctorate there in 1992. He then worked for the Society for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt-Arheilgen, where he was involved in the discovery of the elements with the ordinal numbers 110 ( Darmstadtium ), 111 ( Roentgenium ) and 112 ( Copernicium ). He was considered a leading expert in the field of heavy ion research, especially the complex computer software required for monitoring the radioactive decay processes. After working in Darmstadt, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, USA.

Ninov now researches and teaches at the private University of the Pacific in Stockton in the US state of California. He is married to Caroline Cox, a history professor who also works at the university.

Ninov was best known for allegations of having falsified measurement data on which a much-noticed report was based on the alleged production of the chemical elements 116 ( Livermorium ) and 118 ( Oganesson ) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . This report was published in 1999 in the journal Physical Review Letters (with a total of 15 authors with Ninov, Kenneth Gregorich ), but withdrawn by the LBNL in the following year because the results of the test set-up described by other scientists in Germany, Japan and finally on LBNL themselves could not be reproduced. Ninov was released from the LBNL in 2001 after an extensive investigation into the incident. He sees himself as a scapegoat, continues to assert his innocence and invokes measurement errors in the equipment used.

As a result, the measurement results for the discovery of elements 110 and 112 in Darmstadt, in which Ninov was involved, were examined again. Here, too, a chain of decay turned out to be falsified when the element 110 was detected, but there were enough other observations so that no publication had to be withdrawn.

literature

• Heinrich Zankl: forgers, swindlers, charlatans. Fraud and Counterfeiting in Science . Wiley / VCH, Weinheim 2003, ISBN 3-527-30710-9 .

Web links

• Background report on the website of The New York Times Company (in English)