Professor Abbamonte is one of the originators of the technique of resonant soft x-ray scattering with which he discovered the existence of a Wigner crystal in doped, quasi-1D spin ladders, and showed that stripes in copper-oxide superconductors are charged (among other achievements). This technique is now in use at every major synchrotron facility in the world. He is also known for his solution to the phase problem for inelastic x-ray scattering, which allows real-time imaging of electron motion in with attosecond time resolution. He has used this approach, for example, to image the formation of excitons in insulators, and to measure the effective fine structure constant of graphene.