Lev Landau

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Azerbaijani theoretical physicist (1908–1968)

Landau, whose father was a petroleum engineer and whose mother was a physician, was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. He studied at the university in his native city (1922–24) and at Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) (1924–27), graduating in 1927. In 1929 he visited various scientific centers in Europe, including Copenhagen where he developed a long-lasting friendship and working relationship with Niels Bohr. He returned to the Soviet Union and in 1932 went from Leningrad to Kharkov to head the theoretical physics groups at two of the institutes there. He was appointed professor of physics at Kharkov University in 1935. In 1937, at the request of Pyotr Kapitza, he moved to Moscow as director of theoretical physics at the Institute of Physical Problems and in 1943 became professor of physics at the Moscow State University.

Landau was one of the major theoretical physicists of his day, making numerous contributions to many branches of physics. These included quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, astrophysics, thermodynamics, particle physics, quantum electrodynamics, and low-temperature physics. In Moscow he collaborated with E. M. Lifshitz on a highly successful series of monographs on theoretical physics, published in 1938. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on condensed matter (i.e., matter in the solid or liquid state), especially liquid helium. Liquid helium has such unusual properties when its temperature falls below 2.2 kelvin that physicists describe it as helium II, as opposed to helium I above 2.2 K. To explain the strange superfluidity and superconductivity of helium II, Landau introduced the idea of a ‘phonon’, a quantum of thermal energy, and a ‘roton’, an elementary quantum of vortex motion. The existence of such entities has since been confirmed experimentally.

Under Landau a vigorous school of theoretical physics was created in Moscow. Tragically he was involved in a serious motor accident in 1962 and although strenuous efforts were made to keep him alive his physical powers never returned to normal and he died six years later.

The Soviet theoretical physicist Lev Davidovich Landau (1908-1968) developed a mathematical theory that explained the properties of superfluidity and superconductivity of helium at temperatures close to absolute zero.

Lev Landau, called "Dau" by his students and close associates, was born on Jan. 22, 1908, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaidzhan, to parents of middle-class Jewish background. At 14 he entered the University of Baku; then, in 1924, he transferred to Leningrad State University. In 1927 he graduated with a doctorate from the faculty of physics. Between 1927 and 1929 he continued his postgraduate studies at the Physicotechnical Institute of Leningrad.

In 1929 Landau left the Soviet Union to study for a year and a half at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen as well as at scientific centers in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. During his stay at the institute in Copenhagen, he became closely associated with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr invited Landau in 1933 and 1934 to attend several conferences on theoretical physics. When abroad, Landau published at the age of 22 his classic theory on the diamagnetism of electrons in a metal (Landau's diamagnetism).

Soon after returning to Leningrad, in 1932 Landau received an assignment to head the theoretical section of the Ukrainian Physicotechnical Institute; he also joined the faculties of the Kharkov Institute of Machine Construction and the University of Kharkov. In Kharkov the Landau school of theoretical physics had its beginning.

Between 1938 and 1960 Landau, together with his student and collaborator E. M. Lifshits, wrote a series of volumes under the heading of Course of Theoretical Physics, covering mechanics, classical field theory, quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum theory, statistical physics, fluid mechanics, theory of elasticity, electrodynamics of continuous media, and physical kinetics. Some of the sections are actually based on original research performed by the authors. There are few works on contemporary physics that match the Course of Theoretical Physics in terms of clarity of exposition and scope of treatment; it is therefore not surprising that in April 1962 this veritable encyclopedia received the Lenin Prize.

Low-temperature Physics

In 1937 Landau arrived at the Institute of Physical Problems of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to head its theoretical section. He concentrated on certain paradoxical results obtained from experiments with helium near absolute zero. Helium II is virtually frictionless in its motion; yet when it is placed between two rotating disks, a force, indicating the presence of viscosity, can be measured. In another experiment a flask containing liquid helium was immersed in a bath of liquid helium and then heated; liquid helium was observed to flow out of the flask, but the flask remained full. To explain this paradoxical behavior of liquid helium, Landau regarded helium II as a "quantum liquid" whose properties could not be treated within the framework of classical mechanics. He presumed that helium II possessed two simultaneous forms of motion: normal, which is viscous and transports heat, and superfluid, possessing neither viscosity nor thermal conductivity.

The paradox associated with the non-emptying flask was resolved by Landau's theory, which predicted a superfluid countercurrent whose behavior conforms to the hydrodynamic laws governing ideal and nonviscous fluids with irrotational flow. Landau's theory also predicted that two velocities of sound waves occur if sound is transmitted through helium II. The first sound wave oscillates in helium II as does an ordinary sound wave in an ordinary fluid. But the second sound wave is unique to superfluids. Landau called this wave a "zero" sound wave. For his work in low-temperature physics Landau received the Stalin Prize in 1941, the Fritz London Award in 1960, and the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Other Scientific Contributions

Landau was appointed a full professor of physics at Moscow State University in 1943. In 1946 he was elected to full membership of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, won the Stalin Prize for his thermodynamic theory of phase transitions in solid bodies and of symmetry properties, and published a classic paper on the vibrations of the electronic plasma. Landau's work on the oscillations in plasma is recognized as a pioneering study on the road to harnessing thermonuclear power. It is believed that in the postwar period he made significant contributions to the development of Soviet atomic capability and the success of Soviet rocketry.

In his lifetime Landau published over 120 works covering the areas of hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, astrophysics, quantum field theory, solid-state matter, cryogenics, nuclear physics, and cosmic rays. He received international acclaim for his achievements in theoretical physics. He was elected to membership in the English and the French Physical Society, the Dutch and the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the London Royal Society. In addition to the previously mentioned prizes, Landau received in 1960 the Max Planck Medal from West Germany.

Personality and Outlook

Those who worked closely with Landau appreciated his enthusiasm for science, devotion to creativity in physics, and dedication to high scientific principles. Some have characterized Landau as a "salon" Communist who accepted the ideals of communism, but there is no evidence indicating that he ever joined the Communist party.

Landau revealed in Komsomolskaia pravda, dated July 8, 1964, to a stunned Soviet readership that he too had been caught up in the Stalinist mass purges and that he had been arrested in 1938 as a German spy - despite his Jewish background. After a year's detention Landau had emerged, emaciated and sickly, his black hair turned gray. Ironically, in subsequent years Soviet newspapers portrayed him as an "enthusiastic public-spirited citizen" whose scientific services were highly appreciated by the Soviet government. If there was any crime that Landau was guilty of, it was nonconformism. He appeared at state functions in a checkered sport shirt and at the Moscow Art Theater in sandals. He did not hesitate to lend support to modernistic trends in Soviet art. And he encouraged Soviet scientists to engage in discussions of the philosophical problems of science, thus preventing narrow party ideologues from dominating the scientific field.

On Jan. 7, 1962, Landau was seriously injured in an automobile accident. The process of recovery was slow. On Dec. 10, 1962, he was well enough to receive the Nobel Prize from the Swedish ambassador to Moscow. He died on April 1, 1968. With his passing, the Soviet Union lost its most outstanding theoretical physicist.

Further Reading

The only book-length biography of Landau in English is Alexander Dorozynski, The Man They Wouldn't Let Die (1965). Consult also the biographies in Nobel Foundation, Nobel Lectures: Physics, vol. 3: 1942-1962 (1967), and Royal Society, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 15 (1969). There is a biographical sketch of Landau by Albert Parry in George W. Simmonds, ed., Soviet Leaders (1967). Some of Landau's scientific contributions are discussed by Oscar Buneman in Morton Mitchner, ed., Radiation and Waves in Plasmas (1961); Thomas Howard Stix, The Theory of Plasma Waves (1962); I. M. Khalatnikov, An Introduction to the Theory of Superfluidity (trans. 1965); and J. F. Allen, ed., Superfluid Helium (1966).

Lev Landau
Lev Davidovich Landau (1908-1968)
Born	January 22, 1908(1908-01-22) Baku, Azerbaijan, Russian Empire
Died	April 1, 1968 (aged 60) Moscow, Soviet Union
Residence	Soviet Union
Citizenship	Soviet Union
Fields	Theoretical Physics
Institutions	Baku State University Kharkiv University Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute Institute for Physical Problems MSU Faculty of Physics
Alma mater	Leningrad State University Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute
Doctoral students	Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov
Other notable students	Evgeny Lifshitz
Known for	Superfluidity Superconductivity
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1962)

Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian language: Ле́в Дави́дович Ланда́у; born January 22, 1908 – died April 1, 1968) was a prominent Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. His accomplishments include the co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics, the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second order phase transitions, the Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, and the two-component theory of neutrinos. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C).

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Great Purge 1.3 Last years 1.4 Death 2 The Landau School 3 Legacy 4 Landau's List 5 Works 5.1 Landau and Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics 6 Other books 7 Some books about Landau 8 See also 9 References 10 Further reading

Biography

Early years

Landau was born on January 22, 1908 to a Jewish family in Baku, in what was then Tsarist Russia. Recognized very early as a child prodigy in mathematics, Landau was quoted as saying in later life that he scarcely remembered a time when he was not familiar with calculus. Landau graduated at 13 from gymnasium. His parents regarded him too young to attend university, so for a year he attended the Baku Economical Technicum. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the department of Physics and Mathematics, and the department of Chemistry. Subsequently he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.

In 1924, he moved to the main centre of Soviet physics at the time: the Physics Department of Leningrad State University. In Leningrad, he first made the acquaintance of genuine theoretical physics and dedicated himself fully to its study, graduating in 1927. Landau subsequently enrolled for post-graduate study at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, and at 21, received a doctorate. Landau got his first chance to travel abroad in 1929, on a Soviet government traveling fellowship supplemented by a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

After brief stays in Göttingen and Leipzig, he went to Copenhagen to work in Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. After the visit, Landau always considered himself a pupil of Niels Bohr and Landau's approach to physics was greatly influenced by Bohr. After his stay in Copenhagen he visited Cambridge and Zürich before returning to the Soviet Union. In the period of 1932-1937 he headed the department of theoretical physics at the National Technical University's "Kharkov Polytechnical Institute" (now known as the Kharkov Mechanics and Machine Building Institute).

Great Purge

During the Great Purge, Landau was investigated within the UPTI Affair in Kharkov, but he managed to leave for Moscow. Still, he was arrested on April 27, 1938 and held in an NKVD prison until his release on April 29, 1939, after his colleague Pyotr Kapitsa, an experimental low-temperature physicist, wrote a letter to Stalin, personally vouching for Landau's behavior.

Last years

On January 7, 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming truck. He was severely injured and spent two months in a coma. Landau never fully recovered, and never returned fully to scientific work.

In 1965 former students and coworkers of Landau founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, located in the town of Chernogolovka near Moscow, and headed for the following three decades by Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov.

Death

Landau died on April 1, 1968, aged 60, from complications of the injuries from the accident.

The Landau School

Apart from his theoretical accomplishments, Landau was the principal founder of a great tradition of theoretical physics in Kharkov, Soviet Union (now Kharkiv, Ukraine), sometimes referred to as the "Landau school". He was the head of the Theoretical Division at the Institute for Physical Problems from 1937 until 1962 when, as a result of a car accident, he suffered injuries from which he was never back to science.^[1]His students included Lev Pitaevskii, Alexei Abrikosov, Arkady Levanyuk, Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Gor'kov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Boris L. Ioffe and Isaak Pomeranchuk.

Landau developed a comprehensive exam called the "Theoretical Minimum" which students were expected to pass before admission to the school. The exam covered all aspects of theoretical physics, and between 1943 and 1961 only 43 candidates passed. In this way his students became proper physicists, rather than narrow specialists.

In Kharkov, he and his friend and former student, Evgeny Lifshitz, began writing the Course of Theoretical Physics, ten volumes that together span the whole of the subject and are still widely used as graduate-level physics texts.

Legacy

The minor planet 2142 Landau discovered in 1972 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh is named in his honor.^[2] The lunar crater Landau is named in his honor.

Landau's List

Landau kept a list of names of physicists which he ranked on a logarithmic scale of productivity ranging from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, a 0.5, was assigned to Albert Einstein. A rank of 1 was awarded to 'historical giant' Isaac Newton, Satyendra Nath Bose, Eugene Wigner, and the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger. Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted himself to a 2. David Mermin, writing about Landau, referred to the scale, and ranked himself in the fourth division, in the article My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4.5 to a 2.^[3][4]

Works

Landau and Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics

• vol. 1: "Mechanics". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (3rd ed. ISBN 0750628960)
• vol. 2: "The Classical Theory of Fields". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (4th ed. ISBN 0750627689)
• vol. 3: "Quantum Mechanics: Non-Relativistic Theory". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (3rd ed. ISBN 0750635398)
• vol. 4: "Quantum Electrodynamics". V. B. Berestetsky, E. M. Lifshitz and L. P. Pitaevskii, (2nd ed. ISBN 0750633719)
• vol. 5: "Statistical Physics Pt. 1". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (3rd ed. ISBN 0750633727)
• vol. 6: "Fluid Mechanics". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (2nd ed. ISBN 0750627670)
• vol. 7: "Theory of Elasticity". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, (3rd ed. ISBN 075062633X)
• vol. 8: "Electrodynamics of Continuous Media". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz and L. P. Pitaevskii, (2nd ed., ISBN 0750626348)
• vol. 9: "Statistical Physics Pt. 2". E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii, (1st ed. ISBN 0750626364)
• vol. 10: "Physical Kinetics". E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii, (1st ed. ISBN 0080206417)

Other books

• "General Physics, Mechanics and Molecular Physics". A. I. Akhiezer, E. M. Lifshitz (ISBN 0080091067)

Some books about Landau

• Dorozynski, Alexander (1965). The Man They Wouldn't Let Die. (After Landau's 1962 car accident, the physics community around him rallied to attempt to save his life. They managed to prolong his life until 1968.)
• Landau-Drobantseva, Kora: Professor Landau: How We Lived (1999. In original Russian).
• I.M. Khalatnikov (editor): Landau. The physicist and the man. Recollections of L.D. Landau Translated from the Russian by J.B. Sykes. (Pergamon Press, 1989) ISBN 0-08-036383-0
• Janouch, Frantisek: Lev D. Landau: His life and work (CERN, 1979) ASIN B0007AUCL0
• Kojevnikov, Alexei B.: Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists, History of Modern Physical Sciences Series. (Imperial College Press, 2004) ISBN 1-86094-420-5

See also

• Landau-Hopf theory of turbulence
• Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation
• Landau-Lifshitz model
• Landau (crater)
• Landau theory of second order phase transitions
• Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity
• Landau quantization, Landau levels

References

1. ^ Dorozynski, Alexander, The Man They Wouldn't Let Die (1965)
2. ^ Schmadel, Lutz D. (2003). Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (5th ed.). New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 174. ISBN 3540002383. http://books.google.com/books?q=2141+Simferopol+1970. 
3. ^ Hey, Tony (1997). Einstein's Mirror. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1. ISBN 0-521-43532-3. 
4. ^ Physics Today, November 2006, letter from Asoke Mitra

Further reading

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Lev Landau", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Lev Davidovich Landau
• Landau’s Theoretical Minimum, Landau’s Seminar, ITEP in the Beginning of the 1950’s by Boris L. Ioffe, Concluding talk at the workshop QCD at the Threshold of the Fourth Decade/Ioeffest.
•  EJTP Landau Issue 2008.

• Ammar Sakaji and Ignazio Licata (eds),Lev Davidovich Landau and his Impact on Contemporary Theoretical Physics, Nova Science Publishers, New York, 2009, ISBN 978-1-60692-908-7.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lev Landau

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Physics John Cockcroft / Ernest Walton (1951) · Felix Bloch / Edward Purcell (1952) · Frits Zernike (1953) · Max Born / Walther Bothe (1954) · Willis Lamb / Polykarp Kusch (1955) · William Shockley / John Bardeen / Walter Brattain (1956) · Chen Yang / T. D. Lee (1957) · Pavel Cherenkov / Ilya Frank / Igor Tamm (1958) · Emilio G. Segrè / Owen Chamberlain (1959) · Donald A. Glaser (1960) · Robert Hofstadter / Rudolf Mössbauer (1961) · Lev Landau (1962) · E. P. Wigner / Maria Goeppert-Mayer / J. Hans D. Jensen (1963) · Charles Townes / Nikolay Basov / Alexander Prokhorov (1964) · Sin-Itiro Tomonaga / Julian Schwinger / Richard Feynman (1965) · Alfred Kastler (1966) · Hans Bethe (1967) · Luis Alvarez (1968) · Murray Gell-Mann (1969) · Hannes Alfvén / Louis Néel (1970) · Dennis Gabor (1971) · John Bardeen / Leon Cooper / John Schrieffer (1972) · Leo Esaki / Ivar Giaever / Brian Josephson (1973) · Martin Ryle / Antony Hewish (1974) · A. Bohr / Ben Mottelson / James Rainwater (1975) Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976–2000) | (2001–present)

Persondata
NAME	Landau, Lev Davidovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 22, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH	Baku
DATE OF DEATH	April 1, 1968
PLACE OF DEATH	Moscow

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