What Is a Null Result in Materials?
Liam Fedus says a null result in materials can mean the team intended to produce a structure and every measurement says they did not. Negative controls are part of the experiment. Sometimes the point of the run is to show that a structure was not made. An impurity phase can kill the property being chased, and it can spoil the result.
A negative run can also be a different finding. The team aimed at one structure, and the data showed a new structure that had not been identified before. The result is negative against the plan and still a discovery. A string of failed attempts that finally reaches a known material is process data, the record of how the synthesis was changed until it worked. Even a material that appears in a textbook can be hard to replicate, because so much of materials science is ambiguous about how something was made.
