What went wrong with: "The Interaction of Neutrons With 7Be: "Lack of Standard Nuclear Physics Solution to the "Primordial 7Li Problem"", by M. Gai [arXiv:1812.09914v1]?

TL;DR

This paper critiques a 2018 preprint on neutron interactions with 7Be, highlighting experimental and collaborative misconduct, and concludes that the reported data are unreliable, leading to a request for retraction.

Contribution

It exposes issues in the experimental conduct and authorship claims of a previous study, emphasizing the importance of collaboration integrity and data validity.

Findings

The data from the 2016 SARAF experiment are unreliable.

The preprint was unauthorized and retracted during peer review.

The authors request the retraction of the original arXiv posting.

Abstract

We comment here on results of the project aimed at measuring the 7Be(n,x) reactions at SARAF, Israel, in 2016, posted by M. Gai in [arXiv:1812.09914v1] without the knowledge of parts of the collaboration and against the explicit veto of the collaborators and the administration of the Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland. We address both the experimental shortcomings and the drawbacks in project conduction. M. Gai's preprint is labeled as "on behalf of the SARAF Israel-US-Switzerland Collaboration"; the author list is given as a reference to another unpublished contribution (cited as [27], the NPA8 conference in June 2017 in Catania). However, M. Gai did never have the right to report on unpublished proprietary data of the entire collaboration, and he was not authorized to act "on behalf of the collaboration". The contribution is declared as "accepted for publication", but in fact was retracted during the refereeing process. After several careful data evaluations, we have to state that the results of these measurements are not trustworthy and neither the given experimental data basis nor the corresponding data analysis can be improved further. Therefore, we request to retract the posting [arXiv:1904.03023v1].