Pines’ demon observed as a 3D acoustic plasmon in Sr2RuO4 | Hacker News Reader

Pines’ demon observed as a 3D acoustic plasmon in Sr2RuO4

nature.com

59 pointsfalsandtru11 comments

I was curious what was up with the word demon in this context. Originally I thought it might have to do with Maxwell's Demon, but then I read this from Wikipedia:

"Pines explained his terminology by making the term a half backronym because particles commonly have suffix "-on" and the excitation involved distinct electron motion, resulting in D.E.M.on, or simply demon for short."

so then I thought it was something else but...

"The out-of-phase excitation was termed the "demon" by Pines after James Clerk Maxwell, since he thought Maxwell "lived too early to have a particle or excitation named in his honor."

So apparently the demon does have to do with Maxwell's Demon, but is clever wordplay intended to honor it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pines%27_demon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

It’s fun to see something pop up that read a few weeks ago for work! This kind of excitation is particularly interesting because of how challenging it is to observe-it’s fully electrically neutral, so the vast majority of probes people usually use to interrogate solid state phenomena like light and voltages fully don’t work. There are other excitations that are electrically neutral and therefore awful to work with that we think might be useful for quantum computing. Successful work in this kind of energy space is exciting, and paves the way for the exploitation of so many wonderous patterns of electronic motion that scarcely anyone learns about in college or even grad school.

Complete layman here. When you say excitation, it means that it absorbed some impulse of (electrical?) energy right? Where does the energy go after the excitation is released if the excitation is electrically neutral and doesn't emit photons, is it lost as heat?

This is one of the reasons I love HN. Occasionally there's a headline like this one that I understand 0% of.

If you like that, you'll love the abstract! It makes me feel like I've forgotten what words mean.

That's how I feel every time I stumble into a math thread. It's always interesting to see real people discuss this stuff. Like, I don't have any close friends who have likely multipled a matrix in the last year or probably decade. It seems so far away from ordinary life.

Then you go on HN and there are people just casually chatting about it. They're speaking English but neither the words nor the relation to other words means anything to the uninitiated.

But then there's a few that stand out, like someone will say "You don't really need Bloof tensors, you can model it just as well as a Randolph set of quadrispheres", and it's recognizable as technical discussion comparing the merits of models, but thats about it.

Hehe indeed; I had a similar experience with this article -

"...its plasmon ... is a quantized (OK) collective (right) oscillation (yup) of its electron (got it) density (fine)"

... it's a what what of its what?

It is indeed humbling and gratifying in equal measure to be keeping such company!

Me IRL. I like to think of myself as a reasonably clever person, multidisciplinary science nerd. Not unusual for me to comfortably read through papers in acoustics, astrophysics, applied math, computer science, biology...

This abstract is like a nice swift kick.... :)

After spending a while looking up terms and hurting my head I'm reminded how much I hate quantum. Bullshit academics trying to make particles out of the acoustic waves I know and love. ;)

I have a PhD in Physics and got a little lost in the abstract myself, so don’t feel bad! It’s very dense sentences with pretty technical jargon. After a few re-reads and spot checking some forgotten condensed matter terms of art it made (some) sense.

The only common words in this one are “3D”, “as”, “a”, and “observed”

I know Pete Abbamonte. Smart guy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com