David Pines was born to Sidney Pines, a mechanical engineer, and Edith Pines (née Aldeman).[4] He graduated from Highland Park High School in Dallas in 1940, and then studied at Black Mountain College for one year before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley[5]
Pines earned a bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley in 1944, and began graduate work there. His studies were interrupted after his first semester when he was drafted into the navy. He served for two years, and then followed Robert Oppenheimer, who had served as a mentor at Berkeley, to Princeton University in 1947. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton under David Bohm in 1950.[1][5]
He was the founding director of the Center for Advanced Study, UIUC (1968–70), was vice-president of the Aspen Center for Physics from 1968 to 1972, founder and co-chair of the US-USSR Cooperative Program in Physics, 1968–89; and a co-founder, vice-president, chair of the board of trustees, and co-chair of the science board of the Santa Fe Institute, from 1982 to 1996.
He was the organizer or co-organizer of fifteen workshops and two summer schools of theoretical physics, was an honorary trustee and honorary member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and a member of the board of overseers at Sabancı UniversityinIstanbul.
Co-founder of the Center for Advanced Study, UIUC, 1967; the Aspen Center for Physics, 1967–69; the US-USSR Cooperative Program in Physics, 1968; the Santa Fe Institute, 1982–84; and the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, 1998–1999
Organizer or co-organizer of fifteen workshops and two summer schools of theoretical physics
Aspen Center for Physics: vice-president, 1968–72;
Board of trustees 1968–80; honorary trustee, 1980-; member, 1980-2018
Santa Fe Institute: co-founder, 1984; vice-president,
Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter: founding director and member of board of trustees (now board of governors) and science steering committee, 1999–2018
National Academy of Sciences; chair, Panel on Condensed Matter Physics, 1994–98
National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council:
Physics Survey Committee, 1965–66;
Board on International Scientific Exchange, founder and chair, 1973–1977
US/USSR Workshops in Condensed Matter Theory, founder and co-chair, 1968; 1970; 1974; 1978; 1988
US/USSR Commission on Cooperation in Physics, founder and co-chair, 1975–80
American Academy of Arts and Sciences: chair, physics section and class membership committee, 1996–99
Los Alamos National Laboratory:
T Division Advisory Committee: member 1975–82; chair, 1977–1982
Institute for Defense Analyses, mentor, Defense Sciences Study Group, 1985–2000
In 1956, Pines predicted the existence of electronic modes where electrons in different bands move coherently out of phase, which he dubbed "demon" modes, after James Clerk Maxwell, since he thought he "lived too early to have a particle or excitation named in his honor."[7] Although Pines justified his etymological choice by making the term a half backronym (from D.E.M., which he claimed stood for "distinct electron motion"), the phenomenon is unrelated to Maxwell's statistical mechanics demon.[8]Pines' demon should not be confused with the more common acoustic plasmon which arise from low dimensionality in, for example, 2D- or quasi-2D-materials. In comparison, the demon arises only in multiband materials through opposing currents from different electronic bands, and is not tied to a particular dimensionality. His prediction of the demon was first observed experimentally in 2023 in strontium ruthenate.[9]
His latest research topics concerned the search for the organizing principles responsible for emergent behavior in materials where unexpectedly new classes of behavior emerge in response to the strong and competing interactions among their elementary constituents. Some recent research results on correlated electron materials are the development of a consistent phenomenological description of protected magnetic behavior in the pseudogap state of underdoped cuprate superconductors and the discovery of the protected emergence of itinerancy in the Kondo lattice in heavy electron materials and its description using a two-fluid model. He remained interested in the superfluidity of neutron stars revealed by pulsar glitches and in elementary excitations in the helium liquids.[10]
The Many-Body Problem. (W. A. Benjamin: N.Y) 456 pp. (1961) (Russian translation, State Publishing House, Moscow, 1963)
Elementary Excitations in Solids. (W. A. Benjamin: N. Y.) 312 pp. (1963) (Russian translation, State Publishing House, Moscow, 1965). Japanese translation (Syokabo Press, Tokyo, 1974)
The Theory of Quantum Liquids, Vol. I Normal Fermi Liquids. W. A. Benjamin: NY, 1, 355 pp. (1966). (Russian Translation, Publishing House MIR, Moscow, 1968)
Pines, David; Anderson, Philip W.; Arrow, Kenneth J., eds. (1988). The economy as an evolving complex system: the proceedings of the Evolutionary Paths of the Global Economy Workshop, held September, 1987 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Redwood City, California: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. ISBN9780201156850. Book details.
The Theory of Quantum Liquids Vol. II: Superfluid Bose Liquids (with P. Nozières), Addison-Wesley, 180pp (1990)
