Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam or Mandelshtam ( be, Леанід Ісаакавіч Мандэльштам; rus, Леонид Исаакович Мандельштам, p=lʲɪɐˈnʲit ɨsɐˈakəvʲɪtɕ mənʲdʲɪlʲˈʂtam, a=Ru-Leonid_Mandelstam.ogg, links=y; 4 May 1879 – 27 November 1944) was a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

of Belarusian-

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

background.

Life

Leonid Mandelstam was born in

Mogilev Mogilev (russian: Могилёв, Mogilyov, ; yi, מאָלעוו, Molev, ) or Mahilyow ( be, Магілёў, Mahilioŭ, ) is a city in eastern Belarus, on the Dnieper River, about from the border with Russia's Smolensk Oblast and from the bor ...

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

(now

Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by R ...

). He studied at the Novorossiya University in

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

, but was expelled in 1899 due to political activities, and continued his studies at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

. He remained in Strasbourg until 1914, and returned with the beginning of

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. He was awarded the

Stalin Prize Stalin Prize may refer to: * The State Stalin Prize in science and engineering and in arts, awarded 1941 to 1954, later known as the USSR State Prize The USSR State Prize (russian: links=no, Государственная премия СССР, ...

in 1942. Mandelstam died in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

(now

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

Scientific achievements

The main emphasis of his work was broadly considered theory of

oscillations Oscillation is the repetitive or periodic variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states. Familiar examples of oscillation include a swinging pendulum ...

, which included

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviole ...

and

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

. He was a co-discoverer of inelastic ''combinational

scattering Scattering is a term used in physics to describe a wide range of physical processes where moving particles or radiation of some form, such as light or sound, are forced to deviate from a straight trajectory by localized non-uniformities (including ...

of light'' used now in

Raman spectroscopy Raman spectroscopy () (named after Indian physicist C. V. Raman) is a spectroscopic technique typically used to determine vibrational modes of molecules, although rotational and other low-frequency modes of systems may also be observed. Raman sp ...

(see below). This paradigm-altering discovery (together with G. S. Landsberg) had occurred at the

Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...

just one week earlier than a parallel discovery of the same phenomena by

C. V. Raman Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (; 7 November 188821 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered that when ...

and

K. S. Krishnan Sir Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan, FRS, (4 December 1898 – 14 June 1961) was an Indian physicist. He was a co-discoverer of Raman scattering, for which his mentor C. V. Raman was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. Early life K ...

. In Russian literature it is called ''"combinational scattering of light"'' (from combination of frequencies of photons and molecular vibrations) but in English it is named after Raman.

Discovery of the combinational scattering of light

In 1918, Mandelstam theoretically predicted the

fine structure In atomic physics, the fine structure describes the splitting of the spectral lines of atoms due to electron spin and relativistic corrections to the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation. It was first measured precisely for the hydrogen atom ...

splitting in

Rayleigh scattering Rayleigh scattering ( ), named after the 19th-century British physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), is the predominantly elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the ...

due to light scattering on thermal acoustic waves. Beginning from 1926, Mandelstam and Landsberg initiated experimental studies on vibrational scattering of light in

crystal A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents (such as atoms, molecules, or ions) are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions. In addition, macros ...

s at the Moscow State University. As a result of this research, Landsberg and Mandelstam discovered the effect of the combinational scattering of light on 21 February 1928. They presented this fundamental discovery for the first time at a colloquium on 27 April 1928. They published brief reports about this discovery (experimental results with some attempt at a theoretical explanation) in Russian and in German and then published a comprehensive paper in ''

Zeitschrift für Physik ''Zeitschrift für Physik'' (English: ''Journal for Physics'') is a defunct series of German peer-reviewed physics journals established in 1920 by Springer Berlin Heidelberg. The series stopped publication in 1997, when it merged with other journ ...

''. In the same year, two Indian scientists C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan also observed the inelastic scattering of light. Raman stated that "The line spectrum of the new radiation was first seen on 28 February 1928". Thus, combinational scattering of light was observed by Mandelstam and Landsberg a week earlier than by Raman and Krishnan. However, according to the Physics Nobel Committee, Mandelstam and Landsberg were unable to provide an independent, complete interpretation for the discovery, as they only later cited Raman's article. Also, their observations were limited to crystals, whereas Raman and Krishnan showed the effect in solids, liquids, and vapors, thus proving the universal nature of the effect. Raman's method was further applied with great success in different fields of molecular physics, for example in the composition analysis of liquids, gases, and solids, and provided significant insight on nuclear spins. Hence, the light-scattering phenomenon became known as

Raman scattering Raman scattering or the Raman effect () is the inelastic scattering of photons by matter, meaning that there is both an exchange of energy and a change in the light's direction. Typically this effect involves vibrational energy being gained by a ...

or the Raman effect. The L.I.Mandelshtam's lectures in optics dated by 1944 can be considered as the formal beginning of the second stage of the DNG-

metamaterial A metamaterial (from the Greek word μετά ''meta'', meaning "beyond" or "after", and the Latin word ''materia'', meaning "matter" or "material") is any material engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials. ...

s theory.Slyusar V.I. Metamaterials on antenna solutions.// 7th International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques ICATT’09, Lviv, Ukraine, October 6-9 2009. - Pp. 20

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Scientific school and legacy

Mandelstam founded one of the two major schools of theoretical physics in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

(another being due to Lev D. Landau). In particular, he was mentor to Igor Y. Tamm, a Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics who in turn was a mentor to

Vitaly Ginzburg Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS (russian: Вита́лий Ла́заревич Ги́нзбург, link=no; 4 October 1916 – 8 November 2009) was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with ...

who also received a Nobel Prize in Physics and

Andrey Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for ...

, the "father of Soviet hydrogen bomb" and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after Mandelshtam.

Selected publications

* L. I. Mandelshtam, I. E. Tamm
The uncertainty relation between energy and time in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics
, Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR (ser. fiz.) 9, 122–128 (1945). English translation: J. Phys. (USSR) 9, 249–254 (1945).

References

External links

* * Y.L. Alpert
''Tribute to the Scientific School of L.I. Mandelshtam''
* Sergei I. Vavilov
''Obituary to academician L.I. Mandelstam'', 1945
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mandelshtam, Leonid Isaakovich 1879 births 1944 deaths People from Mogilev Jews from the Russian Empire Belarusian Jews Soviet Jews Belarusian physicists Soviet physicists Soviet inventors Moscow State University alumni Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Stalin Prize winners Jewish physicists University of Strasbourg alumni Optical physicists