When Siavash Golkar, Dung Nguyen, and I were working on what would become our paper 1309.2638, it occurred to us that polarized Raman scattering on fractional quantum Hall systems can create a condensed-matter analog of the graviton. Two years earlier, Duncan Haldane already talked about a “metric” degree of freedom in FQH systems, but here was an experimentally accessible way to test the theoretical ideas.
I knew that the ideal person to whom I could sell the idea of an experiment was Aron Pinczuk, a senior colleague during my junior faculty time at Columbia. Accidentally, I was scheduled to be at a conference at the Simons Foundation in New York, so I made an appointment to see Aron.
When I arrived at the Simons Foundation, I found Duncan among the participants of the conference. I shyly mentioned our ideas to Duncan, expecting a difficult fight. But this time Duncan did not need any convincing, our ideas seemed to be trivial to him. I asked Duncan to join me in visiting Aron, and he agreed.
So around 3:30pm on October 11, 2013, Duncan and I rode a taxi to Upper Manhattan. I don’t remember the arguments I presented to Aron; it is unlikely that I was very persuasive, but Duncan’s presence and arguments must have made my task of convincing Aron easier. Aron told us that polarized Raman scattering on FQH systems would be difficult, but not impossible.
It is gratifying to see that, after a decade, the experiment that we discussed on that day has finally succeeded. Sadly, Aron is no longer with us. His students and collaborators must be credited for bringing the experiment to a successful conclusion.
See Researchers Find First Experimental Evidence for a Graviton-like Particle in a Quantum Material
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