L. D. Landau
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Lev Davidovich Landau (russian: Лев Дави́дович Ланда́у; 22 January 1908 – 1 April 1968) was a Soviet-
Azerbaijani Azerbaijani may refer to: * Something of, or related to Azerbaijan * Azerbaijanis * Azerbaijani language See also * Azerbaijan (disambiguation) * Azeri (disambiguation) * Azerbaijani cuisine * Culture of Azerbaijan The culture of Azerbaijan ...
physicist of Jewish descent who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. His accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics (alongside John von Neumann), the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second-order phase transitions, the Ginzburg–Landau theory of
superconductivity Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike ...
, the theory of
Fermi liquid Fermi liquid theory (also known as Landau's Fermi-liquid theory) is a theoretical model of interacting fermions that describes the normal state of most metals at sufficiently low temperatures. The interactions among the particles of the many-bod ...
s, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, the two-component theory of neutrinos, and Landau's equations for ''S'' matrix singularities. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of
liquid A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, a ...
helium II at a temperature below ().


Life


Early years

Landau was born on 22 January 1908 to Jewish parents in
Baku Baku (, ; az, Bakı ) is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. Baku is located below sea level, which makes it the lowest lying national capital in the world a ...
, the Russian Empire, in what is now Azerbaijan. Landau's father, David Lvovich Landau, was an engineer with the local oil industry, and his mother, Lyubov Veniaminovna Garkavi-Landau, was a doctor. Both came to Baku from Mogilev and both graduated the Mogilev gymnasium. He learned
differential calculus In mathematics, differential calculus is a subfield of calculus that studies the rates at which quantities change. It is one of the two traditional divisions of calculus, the other being integral calculus—the study of the area beneath a curve. ...
at age 12 and integral calculus at age 13. Landau graduated in 1920 at age 13 from gymnasium. His parents considered him too young to attend university, so for a year he attended the Baku Economical Technical School. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at the Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, and the Department of Chemistry. Subsequently, he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.


Leningrad and Europe

In 1924, he moved to the main centre of Soviet physics at the time: the Physics Department of
Leningrad State University Saint Petersburg State University (SPBU; russian: Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет) is a public research university in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Founded in 1724 by a decree of Peter the G ...
, where he dedicated himself to the study of theoretical physics, graduating in 1927. Landau subsequently enrolled for post-graduate studies at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute where he eventually received a doctorate in Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1934. Landau got his first chance to travel abroad during the period 1929–1931, on a Soviet government—
People's Commissariat for Education The People's Commissariat for Education (or Narkompros; russian: Народный комиссариат просвещения, Наркомпрос, directly translated as the "People's Commissariat for Enlightenment") was the Soviet agency charge ...
—travelling fellowship supplemented by a
Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...
fellowship. By that time he was fluent in German and French and could communicate in English. He later improved his English and learned Danish. Bessarab, Maya (1971
Страницы жизни Ландау
'' Московский рабочий''. Moscow
After brief stays in Göttingen and Leipzig, he went to Copenhagen on 8 April 1930 to work at the Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. He stayed there until 3 May of the same year. 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 (mid-1930), where he worked with Paul Dirac, Copenhagen (September to November 1930), and Zurich (December 1930 to January 1931), where he worked with Wolfgang Pauli. Mehra, Jagdish (2001) ''The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics'', Boxed Set of 2 Volumes, World Scientific, p. 952. . From Zurich Landau went back to Copenhagen for the third time and stayed there from 25 February until 19 March 1931 before returning to Leningrad the same year.


National Scientific Center Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, Kharkiv

Between 1932 and 1937, Landau headed the Department of Theoretical Physics at the National Scientific Center Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, and he lectured at the University of Kharkiv and the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute. Apart from his theoretical accomplishments, Landau was the principal founder of a great tradition of theoretical physics in Kharkiv, Ukraine, sometimes referred to as the "Landau school". In Kharkiv, 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. During the Great Purge, Landau was investigated within the UPTI Affair in Kharkiv, but he managed to leave for Moscow to take up a new post. Landau developed a famous 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 1934 and 1961 only 43 candidates passed, but those who did later became quite notable theoretical physicists. In 1932, Landau computed the Chandrashekhar limit; however, he did not apply it to white dwarf stars.


Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow

From 1937 until 1962, Landau was the head of the Theoretical Division at the Institute for Physical Problems. On 27 April 1938, Landau was arrested for a leaflet which compared Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism. He was held in the NKVD's Lubyanka prison until his release, on 29 April 1939, after Pyotr Kapitsa, an experimental low-temperature physicist and the founder and head of the institute, wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin in which he personally vouched for Landau's behaviour and threatened to quit the institute if Landau was not released. After his release, Landau discovered how to explain Kapitsa's superfluidity using sound waves, or
phonon In physics, a phonon is a collective excitation in a periodic, Elasticity (physics), elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules in condensed matter physics, condensed matter, specifically in solids and some liquids. A type of quasiparticle, a phon ...
s, and a new excitation called a
roton In theoretical physics, a roton is an elementary excitation, or quasiparticle, seen in superfluid helium-4 and Bose–Einstein condensates with long-range Dipole, dipolar interactions or Spin–orbit interaction, spin-orbit coupling. The dispersi ...
. Landau led a team of mathematicians supporting Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb development. He calculated the dynamics of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, including predicting the yield. For this work Landau received the Stalin Prize in 1949 and 1953, and was awarded the title "
Hero of Socialist Labour The Hero of Socialist Labour (russian: links=no, Герой Социалистического Труда, Geroy Sotsialisticheskogo Truda) was an honorific title in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries from 1938 to 1991. It repre ...
" in 1954. Landau's students included
Lev Pitaevskii Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii (russian: Лев Петро́вич Пита́евский ; 18 January 1933 – 23 August 2022) was a Russian theoretical physicist, who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, low-temper ...
, Alexei Abrikosov, Aleksandr Akhiezer,
Igor Dzyaloshinskii Igor Ekhielevich Dzyaloshinskii, (Игорь Ехиельевич Дзялошинский, surname sometimes transliterated as Dzyaloshinsky, Dzyaloshinski, Dzyaloshinskiĭ, or Dzyaloshinkiy, 1 February 1931, Moscow – 14 July 2021) was a Russia ...
, Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Gor'kov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Roald Sagdeev and Isaak Pomeranchuk.


Scientific achievements

Landau's accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics (alongside John von Neumann), the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second-order phase transitions, the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, the theory of
Fermi liquid Fermi liquid theory (also known as Landau's Fermi-liquid theory) is a theoretical model of interacting fermions that describes the normal state of most metals at sufficiently low temperatures. The interactions among the particles of the many-bod ...
s, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, the two-component theory of neutrinos, the explanation of flame instability (the Darrieus-Landau instability), and Landau's equations for S matrix singularities. Landau 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)."


Personal life and views

In 1937, Landau married Kora T. Drobanzeva from Kharkiv. Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa, ''Experiment, Theory, Practice: Articles and Addresses'', Springer, 1980, , p. 329. Their son Igor (1946–2011) became a theoretical physicist. Lev Landau believed in " free love" rather than monogamy and encouraged his wife and his students to practise "free love". However, his wife was not enthusiastic. Landau was an atheist. In 1957, a lengthy report to the CPSU Central Committee by the KGB recorded Landau's views on the
1956 Hungarian Uprising The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 10 November 1956; hu, 1956-os forradalom), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was a countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the Hunga ...
, Vladimir Lenin and what he termed "red fascism".


Last years

On 7 January 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming truck. He was severely injured and spent two months in a
coma A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhi ...
. Although Landau recovered in many ways, his scientific creativity was destroyed, and he never returned fully to scientific work. His injuries prevented him from accepting the 1962 Nobel Prize for physics in person. Throughout his life Landau was known for his sharp humour, as illustrated by the following dialogue with a psychologist,
Alexander Luria Alexander Romanovich Luria (russian: Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия, p=ˈlurʲɪjə; 16 July 1902 – 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He develope ...
, who tried to test for possible brain damage while Landau was recovering from the car crash:Kora Drobantseva's memoirs
Chapter 38, "The way we lived"; the episode with
Alexander Luria Alexander Romanovich Luria (russian: Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия, p=ˈlurʲɪjə; 16 July 1902 – 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He develope ...
(in the original Russian text, referred to as ''Лурье'') testing Lev Landau on intellectual abilities
:Luria: "Please draw me a circle" :Landau draws a cross :Luria: "Hm, now draw me a cross" :Landau draws a circle :Luria: "Landau, why don't you do what I ask?" :Landau: "If I did, you might come to think I've become mentally retarded". In 1965 former students and co-workers of Landau founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, located in the town of Chernogolovka near Moscow, and led for the following three decades by Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov. In June 1965, Lev Landau and Yevsei Liberman published a letter in the ''New York Times'', stating that as Soviet Jews they opposed U.S. intervention on behalf of the
Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, also known by its acronym SSSJ, was founded in 1964 by Jacob Birnbaum to be a spearhead of the U.S. movement for rights of the Soviet Jewry. Small, medium, and 6-digit-size demonstrations, at important loca ...
.


Death

Landau died on 1 April 1968, aged 60, from complications of the injuries sustained in the car accident he was involved in six years earlier. He was buried at the
Novodevichy cemetery Novodevichy Cemetery ( rus, Новоде́вичье кла́дбище, Novodevichye kladbishche) is a cemetery in Moscow. It lies next to the southern wall of the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist ...
.


Fields of contribution

* DLVO theory * Fermi liquid theory * Quasiparticle * Ivanenko–Landau–Kähler equation * Landau damping * Landau distribution * Landau gauge * Landau kinetic equation * Landau pole * Landau susceptibility *
Landau potential The grand potential is a quantity used in statistical mechanics, especially for irreversible processes in open systems. The grand potential is the characteristic state function for the grand canonical ensemble. Definition Grand potential is defi ...
* Landau quantization * Landau theory *
Landau–Squire jet In fluid dynamics, Landau–Squire jet or Submerged Landau jet describes a round submerged jet issued from a point source of momentum into an infinite fluid medium of the same kind. This is an exact solution to the incompressible form of the Navier- ...
*
Landau–Levich problem In fluid dynamics, Landau–Levich flow or the Landau–Levich problem describes the flow created by a moving plate which is pulled out of a liquid surface. Landau–Levich flow finds many applications in thin film coating. The solution to the prob ...
*
Landau–Hopf theory of turbulence In physics, the Landau–Hopf theory of turbulence, named for Lev Landau and Eberhard Hopf, was until the mid-1970s, the accepted theory of how a fluid flow becomes turbulent. It states that as a fluid flows faster, it develops more Fourier mode ...
* Ginzburg–Landau theory *
Darrieus–Landau instability The Darrieus–Landau instability or hydrodynamic instability is an instrinsic flame instability that occurs in premixed flames, caused by the density variation due to the thermal expansion of the gas produced by the combustion process. In simple t ...
* Landau–Lifshitz aeroacoustic equation *
Landau–Raychaudhuri equation In general relativity, the Raychaudhuri equation, or Landau–Raychaudhuri equation, is a fundamental result describing the motion of nearby bits of matter. The equation is important as a fundamental lemma for the Penrose–Hawking singularity the ...
*
Landau–Zener formula The Landau–Zener formula is an analytic solution to the equations of motion governing the transition dynamics of a two-state quantum system, with a time-dependent Hamiltonian varying such that the energy separation of the two states is a linea ...
* Landau–Lifshitz model * Landau–Lifshitz pseudotensor * Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation * Landau–Pomeranchuk–Migdal effect * Landau–Yang theorem *
Landau principle ''S''-matrix theory was a proposal for replacing local quantum field theory as the basic principle of elementary particle physics. It avoided the notion of space and time by replacing it with abstract mathematical properties of the ''S''-matri ...
*
Stuart–Landau equation The Stuart–Landau equation describes the behavior of a nonlinear oscillating system near the Hopf bifurcation, named after John Trevor Stuart and Lev Landau. In 1944, Landau proposed an equation for the evolution of the magnitude of the disturban ...
* Superfluidity *
Superconductivity Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike ...


Pedagogy

*'' Course of Theoretical Physics''


Legacy

Two celestial objects are named in his honour: *the minor planet 2142 Landau. *the
lunar crater Lunar craters are impact craters on Earth's Moon. The Moon's surface has many craters, all of which were formed by impacts. The International Astronomical Union currently recognizes 9,137 craters, of which 1,675 have been dated. History The wor ...
Landau. The highest prize in theoretical physics awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences is named in his honour: * Landau Gold Medal On 22 January 2019, Google celebrated what would have been Landau's 111th birthday with a Google doodle. The Landau-Spitzer Award (American Physical Society), which recognizes outstanding contributions to plasma physics and European-United States collaboration, is named in-part in his honor.


Landau's ranking of physicists

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, 0, was assigned to Isaac Newton. Albert Einstein was ranked 0.5. A rank of 1 was awarded to the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Satyendra Nath Bose, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, and others, while members of rank of 5 were deemed "pathologists". Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted to a 2.
David Mermin Nathaniel David Mermin (; born 30 March 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term " boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on solid ...
, 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".


In popular culture

* The Russian television film ''My Husband – the Genius'' (translation of the Russian title ''Мой муж – гений'') released in 2008 tells the biography of Landau (played by
Daniil Spivakovsky Daniil Ivanovich Spivakovsky (russian: Даниил Иванович Спиваковский; August 28, 1969, Moscow) is a Russian film and theater actor, Honored Artist of Russia (2007). Head of the workshop of Theatre faculty of the Moscow In ...
), mostly focusing on his private life. It was generally panned by critics. People who had personally met Landau, including famous Russian scientist Vitaly Ginzburg, said that the film was not only terrible but also false in historical facts. * Another film about Landau, '' Dau'', is directed by
Ilya Khrzhanovsky Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky (russian: Илья́ Андре́евич Хржановский; born 11 August 1975) is a Russian-born film director, screenwriter, film producer and member of the European Film Academy. His father Andrei Khrzhano ...
with non-professional actor Teodor Currentzis (an orchestra conductor) as Landau. Dau was a common nickname of Lev Landau.Дао Ландау
. strf.ru (25 January 2008)


Works

Landau wrote his first paper '' On the derivation of Klein–Fock equation'', co-authored with
Dmitri Ivanenko Dmitri Dmitrievich Ivanenko (russian: Дми́трий Дми́триевич Иване́нко; July 29, 1904 – December 30, 1994) was a Ukrainian theoretical physicist who made great contributions to the physical science of the twentieth cent ...
in 1926, when he was 18 years old. His last paper titled ''Fundamental problems'' appeared in 1960 in an edited version of tributes to Wolfgang Pauli. A complete list of Landau's works appeared in 1998 in the Russian journal ''Physics-Uspekhi''. Landau would allow himself to be listed as a co-author of a journal article on two conditions: 1) he brought up the idea of the work, partly or entirely, and 2) he performed at least some calculations presented in the article. Consequently, he removed his name from numerous publications of his students where his contribution was less significant.


''Course of Theoretical Physics''

* * *
2nd ed. (1965)
at archive.org * * * * * * *


Other

* * * * * in 4 volumes: volume 1 ''Physical bodies'' ; volume 2 ''Molecules'' ; volume 3 ''Electrons'' and volume 4 ''Photons and nuclei''; vols. 3 & 4 by Kitaigorodsky alone


See also

*
List of Jewish Nobel laureates Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 900 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews. * * * * * * * * The number of Jews receiving Nobel prizes has been the subject of some attention.* * *"Jews rank high among winners of Nobel, but why ...
* List of things named after Lev Landau


References


Further reading

;Books * (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.) * * * * * ;Articles * Karl Hufbauer, "Landau's youthful sallies into stellar theory: Their origins, claims, and receptions", ''Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences'', 37 (2007), 337–354.
"As a student, Landau dared to correct Einstein in a lecture". Global Talent News.
*


Landau's Theoretical Minimum, Landau's Seminar, ITEP in the Beginning of the 1950s
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 Ignazio Licata, born 1958, is an Italian theoretical physicist, professor and scientific director of the ''Institute for Scientific Methodology'', Italy. Education and work Licata has studied with David Bohm, Jean-Pierre Vigier, Abdus Salam and ...
(eds)
Lev Davidovich Landau and his Impact on Contemporary Theoretical Physics
Nova Science Publishers, New York, 2009, . *
Gennady Gorelik Gennady Gorelik (born 1948, Lviv) is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. A physicist by education and historian by occupation, he published ten books and many articles on popular science and ...

"The Top Secret Life of Lev Landau"
''Scientific American'', Aug. 1997, vol. 277(2), 53–57
JSTOR link
* Maya Bessarab
"Landau's Life Pages(in Russian)"


External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Landau, Lev Lev Landau 1908 births 1968 deaths Nobel laureates in Physics Soviet Nobel laureates Azerbaijani Jews Scientists from Baku Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery Fluid dynamicists Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Foreign Members of the Royal Society Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Heroes of Socialist Labour Jewish atheists Jewish physicists Lenin Prize winners Members of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina Moscow State University faculty Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology faculty People from Baku Governorate Recipients of the Order of Lenin Saint Petersburg State University alumni Soviet atheists Soviet inventors Soviet Jews Soviet physicists Stalin Prize winners Theoretical physicists National University of Kharkiv academic personnel Winners of the Max Planck Medal Superfluidity