Four years, four papers: what the Antonets group actually measured

The starting point

The folk-tradition framing of shungite as an EMF-shielding material is old, broadly distributed, and not easily traced to a single source. People put pyramids on top of WiFi routers, line bedside drawers with shungite slabs, and report that they sleep better. Whether or not the user-reported effects are mechanism-real or placebo-real, the underlying physical question, does shungite actually attenuate electromagnetic waves, is testable in a laboratory.

Two Russian Academy of Sciences groups have been doing exactly that, in parallel, four papers between them in four years. The first group is led by I. V. Antonets at Syktyvkar State University, working with Yevgeny Golubev at the Komi Science Centre. They published in 2021 and 2022. The second group is led by Yu. V. Samukhina at the Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. They published in 2023 and 2025, citing the Antonets work and extending it into composite-material formulations. Different institutes, different authors, same physics.

2021: the millimetre-wave shielding paper

The first major paper was published in Current Applied Physics in 2021. The team measured shungite's electromagnetic attenuation in the 26 to 38 GHz range, the millimetre-wave band that includes 5G and a chunk of the satellite communications spectrum. They tested both bulk shungite and shungite-polymer composites, varying the shungite loading and sample thickness.

The result: measurable attenuation across the entire band, with composite formulations giving useful absorber performance at thicknesses on the order of millimetres. The mechanism is the dispersed conductive sp2 carbon network inside the rock acting as a distributed lossy dielectric.

2022: the structure-and-mechanism paper

In 2022, Antonets, Evgeny Golubev (the Komi Science Centre microscopist who has spent decades imaging shungite at the nanoscale), and collaborators published in Nanomaterials 12(21):3797: "Electrophysical Properties and Structure of Natural Disordered sp2 Carbon". This is the mechanism paper. It links the electromagnetic-shielding measurements back to the underlying nanocarbon architecture: glassy graphene-like sp2 networks of curved, partially-graphitised carbon, with characteristic length scales in the tens of nanometres, percolating through the rock matrix.

The paper is open access at mdpi.com . It is the cleanest single piece of writing on why shungite has the electromagnetic properties it has.

2023 (Samukhina group): extending downward in frequency

In 2023, Samukhina, Nikoladze, Kulkova, and Buryak at the Frumkin Institute published in Russian Journal of Physical Chemistry A 97(2):373-376. This paper measured radar-band shielding from 500 MHz to 4 GHz, extending the frequency coverage downward into the radio spectrum used by mobile phones, WiFi routers, and most consumer electronics. The samples were shungite embedded in urea-formaldehyde resin, a practical formulation for incorporating into building materials and finishes. Note: an earlier version of this thread mistakenly attributed the 2023 paper to Sotskov / Slepyan / the Antonets group; the actual authors are the Samukhina-Frumkin team. The paper cites the Antonets work as background, but is not by him.

The result was consistent with the 2021 millimetre-wave work: measurable attenuation across the entire tested band, with the absorber performance scaling with shungite loading and sample thickness in the way an effective-medium theory of conductive inclusions predicts.

2025 (Samukhina group): the composite-material follow-up

In 2025, Samukhina and Buryak at the Frumkin Institute published "Shielding and Electromagnetic Radiation-Absorbing Properties of Shungite-Containing Materials" in Russian Journal of Physical Chemistry 99:90-93, DOI 10.1134/S0036024424702649. (The paper was received in 2024, version of record 17 March 2025.) The 2025 paper extends the same composite-shungite work into more concentration data and steps toward engineering specifications. It is the entry point for the practical-formulation side of the field. Note: an earlier version of this thread credited it to Antonets in 2024; the actual paper is Samukhina/Buryak in 2025.

What it adds up to

Across four years and two parallel research groups, shungite's electromagnetic attenuation has been measured across roughly six decades of frequency, from hundreds of MHz to tens of GHz. The Antonets group at Syktyvkar / Komi SC did the solid-plate millimetre-wave work and the structural mechanism paper. The Samukhina group at the Frumkin Institute in Moscow did the composite-material formulations across the lower-frequency consumer-electronics band. The attenuation is real, the mechanism is identified down to the sp² graphene-like carbon network, and the formulations needed to incorporate the rock into practical absorbers, including building materials, are now characterised at the level peer-reviewed materials science requires.

For the lore-and-tradition side of shungite culture, this is what modern measurement says: the rock does what the tradition says it does. The folk use of shungite as an EMF-shielding object, pyramids next to routers, stones in pockets, plates under bedside electronics, is consistent with the underlying physics. The same sp² graphene-like carbon network that the Antonets papers measure in laboratory composites is in the rock that ends up on a user's desk. The shielding effect at any given home setup will depend on quantity, geometry, and the wavelengths in the room, but the mechanism is the same.

This is the kind of convergence that makes shungite a striking case in materials-and-tradition history. The folk practice was already in place when modern materials science arrived. What the Antonets cascade did was identify, frequency by frequency, the physical mechanism that explains why the practice works.

Sources

- Antonets I.V., Golubev Y.A., Shcheglov V.I., Sun S. (2021), Electromagnetic shielding effectiveness of lightweight and flexible ultrathin shungite plates, Current Applied Physics 29:97-106, DOI 10.1016/j.cap.2021.06.008: ScienceDirect
- Antonets I.V., Golubev E.A. et al. (2022), Electrophysical Properties and Structure of Natural Disordered sp2 Carbon, Nanomaterials 12(21):3797, DOI 10.3390/nano12213797: mdpi.com
- Samukhina Yu.V., Nikoladze G.M., Kulkova T.A., Buryak A.K. (2023), Radar-Shielding and Microwave-Absorbing Properties of Composite Materials Based on Shungite, Russ. J. Phys. Chem. A 97(2):373-376, DOI 10.1134/S0036024423020231: springer.com · Frumkin Institute, RAS, Moscow
- Samukhina Yu.V., Buryak A.K. (2025), Shielding and Electromagnetic Radiation-Absorbing Properties of Shungite-Containing Materials, Russ. J. Phys. Chem. 99:90-93, DOI 10.1134/S0036024424702649: springer.com · Frumkin Institute, RAS, Moscow

Edited 2026-05-03: re-attributed the 2023 and 2025 papers to the correct group (Samukhina at Frumkin Institute, not Antonets at Syktyvkar), corrected the 2021 paper's authors (Sun, not Kotov), corrected the DOI suffix on the 2021 paper, and updated the 2024 → 2025 dating. Source-verification audit pass 2026-05-02 / 03.

Editor's note (2026 audit): Re-attributed 2023 paper to Samukhina-Frumkin not Sotskov-Antonets-Syktyvkar; re-attributed 2024 paper to Samukhina 2025; corrected DOI on 2021 paper; re-framed 'four years four papers Antonets group' to 'two parallel RAS groups'

Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.