Mark Megahan
Peter Abbamonte wasn’t planning to conjure up Pines’ demon but the 67 year old conjecture slipped out from behind a molecule of strontium ruthenate and just sat there laughing at him. Don’t call it “serendipitous,” he snarls. The doctor “emphasized that his team used a not-so-widely employed method on a not-so-widely studied substance. They were bound to find something new and significant because they were doing something different.” They went looking for thrills and found them by conjuring up a mathematical gremlin.
Pines’ demon unleashed on world
Pretty close to seven decades ago, physics professor David Pines described his demon. It’s not the sort you’re familiar with. The theoretical guys cook up imaginary what-if scenarios used as thought experiments to test out their theories for holes in the logic.
The one Pines unleashed on the world was the idea of “two electron bands oscillating out of phase.” That’s critical because the state can produce an electron with no mass.
Ever since 2018, Dr. Peter Abbamonte, who teaches physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been conducting studies of a substance called strontium ruthenate. It has the chemical makeup Sr2RuO4.
All he was trying to do was catalog the material’s “electronic properties.” He almost didn’t notice when the demon appeared.
Abbamonte and his team use the “momentum-resolved electron energy-loss spectroscopy” method. You probably knew that already. What it means in ordinary English is that “electrons are shot into the metal to observe its features.”
By doing it that way, they can detect what physicists call “plasmons.” Those are funky “quasi” particles which only originate from the oscillations of electrons. One of those plasmon varieties happens to be the Pines’ demon one.
No longer just a theory
After the team collected enough data to start crunching the numbers they started to notice a clump of data points was looking decidedly diabolical. The computer was telling them one of the material’s electronic modes is one with “no mass.”
That quickly “piqued the interest of the researchers, who even laughed off the possibility that they had found Pines’ demon.”
If it looks like a duck and quacks, it’s probably a duck, the saying goes. After they eliminated mistakes and began to realize the data was accurate, they soon realized the only possible explanation for the readings.
They had “found two electron bands oscillating out of phase, much like Pines described nearly seven decades ago,” when he conjured up his famous demon.
They didn’t find it by mistake, they were looking for something, they just didn’t know what it was. Still, finding the demon was a bonus, the professor admits.
“It speaks to the importance of just measuring stuff. Most big discoveries are not planned. You go look somewhere new and see what’s there.” Even when it leads straight to a demon. This one caged safely in a pentagram could be worth $1 million in dynamite money, otherwise known as a “Nobel prize.“
