In four short years Jan Hendrik Schon went from scientific nobody to one of the most talked-about young physicists in the world. His competitors had any number of reasons to be impressed.

There was his jump from a little-known German university to Bell Labs in New Jersey, one of the most storied research centers in the world. There was his seemingly tireless ability to crank out scientific papers - 76 with his name since 2000, a pace that leaves many physicists in awe.

But most of all, there was Schon's research. Whether he was creating exotic organic lasers or molecule-sized transistors - technologies that could revolutionize electronics - the 31-year-old seemed to have an uncanny ability to strike gold every time he entered the laboratory.

"It was like, 'Oh my gosh, here he goes again, revolutionizing another area,'" says physicist Paul McEuen of Cornell University. Others predicted that a Nobel Prize was surely in Schon's future.

Now the buzz is whether Schon and several of his collaborators at Bell Labs might have invented their results. If so, scientists say, it would be the most serious case of fraud ever uncovered in physics.

Although there have long been whispers that some of the young physicist's results appeared too good to be true, McEuen and others discovered something alarming last month: Graphs in several of Schon's papers looked oddly similar though they illustrated very different experiments. By last week, the number of suspect papers has grown to at least a dozen.

Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs' corporate parent, has worked quickly to assemble an independent panel of physicists to determine whether Schon doctored his data or simply got sloppy. It is also possible, some scientists say, that the graphs look similar by coincidence - although that explanation is starting to look less likely.

"Once any reasonably intelligent person saw the data, they'd be nervous about it," says Charles Marcus, a physicist at Harvard University who was also among the first to find discrepancies.

Before he stopped giving interviews, Schon told the journal Science that he stands by his research: "I am convinced they will show I haven't done anything wrong."

But the investigation has shaken many physicists. Fraud in science is rare. The National Institutes of Health investigates only a few dozen misconduct cases each year among the thousands of biomedical scientists it funds. For reasons nobody quite understands, deception in physics appears to be rarer still.

If Schon is found to have deliberately manipulated his data, it would be "unprecedented," says Spencer Weart, director of the American Institute of Physics' history center in College Park. "There's no known case like it in modern times."

The last time a physics experiment drew such intense scrutiny was in 1989, when two little-known University of Utah scientists announced that they had harnessed the secret of the sun's energy in a test tube at room temperature - the discovery of so-called cold fusion. The announcement, which promised a nearly limitless source of cheap energy, turned out to be wrong. But a panel later determined that the scientists were guilty only of sloppy lab work and wishful thinking.

Other physicists - some of them famous - have been accused and sometimes caught cutting corners and fudging figures to make their theories more persuasive.

Contemporaries of Galileo Galilei, for example, complained that they were unable to reproduce certain experiments, leading some historians to believe the great 17th-century Italian physicist might have invented his results.

To silence skeptics of his landmark Principia, British physicist Sir Isaac Newton tweaked calculations on sound and gravitation to make his results better fit his predictions - deceptions unnoticed for more than 250 years, say William Broad and Nicholas Wade in Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science.

Then there is Robert Millikan, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for calculating the electric charge of the electron. Millikan had conducted a series of ingenious experiments involving tiny droplets of oil, experiments that were famously tricky and sometimes yielded unusual results.

To prevent critics from poking holes in his findings, Millikan published only his best results in a 1913 paper, historians found. By selecting only a third of his measurements, Millikan broke a cardinal rule of science: full disclosure of data. To make matters worse, Millikan insisted in his 1913 paper that he had used "all the drops experimented upon" to make his calculations.

The five-person panel investigating Schon will have full access to his published papers and lab notebooks - and to Schon and his collaborators. "Whatever they want, they can have," says Saswato Das, a spokesman for Bell Labs.

"There are so many allegations floating around, we have to find out what's substantive and what's not," said Malcolm Beasley, a Stanford University physicist appointed to lead the inquiry. "This is totally new territory to all of us."

For many physicists, the accusations are almost unimaginable. Scientists at Bell Labs - the birthplace of everything from the transistor and the laser to long-distance dialing and the communications satellite - have won six Nobel Prizes in physics since it was opened as the research arm of American Telephone and Telegraph in 1925.

"This place was a national treasure," said physicist Robert L. Park, author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud.

Schon, for his part, is described as quiet, bright and modest. A German national, he joined Lucent in 1998 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Konstanz.

Last month, just days before the allegations over duplicated graphs surfaced, Schon gave a symposium on his research at the University of Maryland. Although faculty members and students peppered him with questions, "he did not at all impress me as someone who had tried to cover something up," says Richard Greene, director of the university's Center for Superconductivity Research in College Park.

"He's the most intelligent student I ever had," said physicist Ernst Bucher, who was Schon's thesis adviser at the University of Konstanz.

And, he said, he is one of the hardest working. Bucher recalls frequently finding Schon tinkering in his laboratory late at night and being in the same spot early the next morning. "I don't know when he ever slept," says Bucher, reached by telephone at his office in Germany.

Schon's hard work appeared to pay dividends. Last fall, for example, Schon and his team announced that they had created a transistor just one molecule wide - a nanoelectronics advance that would open the door to a new breed of ultrafast, ultratiny computing machines.

In other work, Schon and his team created buckyballs, ball-shaped molecules composed of 60 carbon atoms that act as superconductors at temperatures far warmer than had been previously achieved. Creating superconductors - materials that conduct electricity with almost no energy loss - that function at warmer temperatures is one of the Holy Grails of modern physics.

"The claims made in these papers were revolutionary," says Marcus, the Harvard physicist. "This is stuff that would change the world."

But even before the discovery of the suspect graphs, some of Schon's published claims were viewed with skepticism, if not outright suspicion, by some physicists who were having trouble repeating the experiments in their own laboratories - the test that all discoveries must pass before being widely accepted. Even Schon's former thesis adviser admits that he has been unable to reproduce his former student's experiments.

Bucher agrees that Schon's similar graphs and unconfirmed experiments are troubling. "It doesn't prove he has faked his data," he says. Schon could have made an honest error, Bucher says.

Or he could have been rushed and careless. Bucher, a consultant for Lucent, said he wouldn't be surprised if Lucent, eager for a public relations boost, had pushed Schon to publish his findings before he was ready. "I don't think we can blame everything on Hendrik Schon," Bucher says.

But it might not matter. The damage to Schon's career - and his stunning research - might already have been done, even if Schon and his collaborators are eventually cleared.

"They've raised questions about the credibility of a major portion of their work, which is not a good thing for science," says Allen Goldman, a University of Minnesota physicist who has spent nearly two years trying to reproduce one of the Bell experiments without success.

If it turns out that Goldman and other physicists had been wasting their time chasing phantom discoveries, "there are people who will never forgive them," he says.