In his later years, Ghiorso continued research toward finding superheavy elements, fusion energy, and innovative electron beam sources. He was a non-participating co-author of the experiments in 1999 that gave evidence of elements 116 and 118, which later turned out to be a case of scientific fraud perpetrated by the first author, Victor Ninov. He also had brief research interests in the free quark experiment of William Fairbank of Stanford, in the discovery of element 43, and in the electron disk accelerator, among others.