Lev Landau

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Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian language: Ле́в Дави́дович Ланда́у) (January 22, 1908 – 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).

Biography

Early years

Landau was born January 22, 1908 into a Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan. 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 the Gymnasium and, because he was too young to go to the university, attended the Baku Economical Technical School. At the age of 14, he matriculated at Baku State University in 1922, studying in two departments simultaneously: the Physico-Mathematical and the Chemical. In 1924 he moved to the Physics Department of Leningrad University, 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 go abroad in 1929, on a Soviet government traveling fellowship supplemented by a Rockefeller Fellowship. After brief stays in Göttingen and Leipzig, he went to Copenhagen to work in Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. Landau always considered himself a pupil of Bohr's, and his attitude to physics was greatly influenced by Bohr's example. 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 Kharkov Mechanics and Machine Building Institute.

The Landau school

Apart from his theoretical accomplishments, Landau was the principal founder of a great tradition of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union centered at Kharkov (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 able to recover fully. His students include Lev Pitaevskii, Alexei Abrikosov, Arkady Levanyuk, Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Gor'kov, Isaak Khalatnikov and Boris Ioffe.

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 only 43 candidates ever passed. In this way his students became proper physicists, rather than narrow specialists.

It was also in Kharkov that, with his friend and former student, E.M. Lifshitz, he started to write the well-known Course of Theoretical Physics, ten volumes that together span the whole of the subject and are still widely used as graduate-level physics texts.

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.

Death and legacy

On January 7, 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming lorry. He was severely injured and spent three months in a coma. Landau never recovered fully and was much less creative than he used to be. His death on April 1, 1968 was also a consequence of the injuries from the accident.

The minor planet 2142 Landau discovered in 1972 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh is named in his honor.

Landau's list

Landau kept a list of names of physicists which he ranked on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, a 0, was assigned to Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein received a 0.5. A rank of 1 was awarded to Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, as well as Satyendra Nath Bose and Eugene Wigner. Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted himself to a 2. David Mermin was ranked in the fourth division, which was considered quite respectable. Mermin would later write My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4.5 to a 2. In spite of his consideration of his own talent by the so-called scale, Landau is widely considered among Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman to be a brilliant physicist with a superb imaginative intellect.

Works

Landau and Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics

vol. 1: "Mechanics". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 2: "The Classical Theory of Fields". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 3: "Quantum Mechanics: Non-Relativistic Theory". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 4: "Quantum Electrodynamics". V. B. Berestetsky, E. M. Lifshitz and L. P. Pitaevskii
vol. 5: "Statistical Physics Pt. 1". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 6: "Fluid Mechanics". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 7: "Theory of Elasticity". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz
vol. 8: "Electrodynamics of Continuous Media". L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz and L. P. Pitaevskii
vol. 9: "Statistical Physics Pt. 2". E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii
vol. 10: "Physical Kinetics". E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii

Other Books

"General Physics, Mechanics and Molecular Physics". A. I. Akhiezer, E. M. Lifshitz

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