Lev Landau

Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian: Лев Дави́дович Ланда́у; 22 January 1908 – 1 April 1968) was a Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics.^[1][2][3] He was also involved in the design of the Soviet atomic bomb.

His accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the

Landau was born on 22 January 1908 to

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,^[17] Copenhagen (September to November 1930),^[18] and Zürich (December 1930 to January 1931), where he worked with Wolfgang Pauli.^[17] From Zürich Landau went back to Copenhagen for the third time^[19] and stayed there from 25 February until 19 March 1931 before returning to Leningrad the same year.^[20]

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

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.[21]^[22]

In 1932, Landau computed the Chandrasekhar limit;^[23] however, he did not apply it to white dwarf stars.^[24]

Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow

From 1937 until 1962, Landau was the head of the Theoretical Division at the Institute for Physical Problems.^[25]

On 27 April 1938, Landau was arrested for a leaflet which compared Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism.^[3][26] 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) and Bohr wrote letters to Joseph Stalin.^[27][28] Kapitsa personally vouched for Landau's behaviour and threatened to quit the institute if Landau was not released.^[29] After his release, Landau discovered how to explain Kapitsa's superfluidity using sound waves, or phonons, and a new excitation called a roton.^[3]

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" in 1954.^[3]

Landau's students included Lev Pitaevskii, Alexei Abrikosov, Aleksandr Akhiezer, Igor Dzyaloshinskii, Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Gor'kov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Roald Sagdeev and Isaak Pomeranchuk.

Scientific achievements

Landau's accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the

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)."[30]

Personal life and views

In 1937, Landau married Kora T. Drobanzeva from Kharkiv.^[31] 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.^[3]

Landau was an atheist.^[32][33][34] In 1957, a lengthy report to the CPSU Central Committee by the KGB recorded Landau's views on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Vladimir Lenin and what he termed "red fascism".^[35] Hendrik Casimir recalls him as a passionate communist, emboldened by his revolutionary ideology. Landau's drive in establishing Soviet science was in part due to his devotion to socialism. In 1935 he published a piece entitled “Bourgeoisie and Contemporary Physics” in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia in which he criticized religious superstition and the dominance of capital, which he saw as bourgeois tendencies, citing “unprecedented opportunities for the development of physics in our country, provided by the Party and the government.” ^[3]

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. Although Landau recovered in many ways, his scientific creativity was destroyed,^[25] and he never returned fully to scientific work. His injuries prevented him from accepting the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics in person.^[36]

Throughout his life Landau was known for his sharp humour, as illustrated by the following dialogue with a psychologist, Alexander Luria, who tried to test for possible brain damage while Landau was recovering from the car crash:^[16][37]

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 Khalatnikov.

In June 1965, Lev Landau and Evsei 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.^[38] However, there are doubts that Landau authored this letter.^[39]

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.^[40]

Fields of contribution

Pedagogy

Legacy

Two celestial objects are named in his honour:

• the
  2142 Landau.^[41]
• the lunar crater 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.^[42]

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.^[43]

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.^[44][45] 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".^[46] Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted to a 2. N. 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".^[47][45][48]

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), 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 with non-professional actor Teodor Currentzis (an orchestra conductor) as Landau. Dau was a common nickname of Lev Landau.^[49] The film was part of the multidisciplinary art project DAU.^[50][51]

Works

Landau wrote his first paper On the derivation of Klein–Fock equation, co-authored with Dmitri Ivanenko 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.^[52] 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.^[49]

Course of Theoretical Physics

• L. D. Landau,
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2896-9
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz (1975). The Classical Theory of Fields. Vol. 2 (4th ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2768-9
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz (1977). Quantum Mechanics: Non-Relativistic Theory. Vol. 3 (3rd ed.). Pergamon Press.
  archive.org
• V. B. Berestetskii; E. M. Lifshitz;
  ISBN 978-0-7506-3371-0
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz (1980). Statistical Physics, Part 1. Vol. 5 (3rd ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-3372-7
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz (1987). Fluid Mechanics. Vol. 6 (2nd ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-08-033933-7
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz (1986). Theory of Elasticity. Vol. 7 (3rd ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2633-0
  .
• L. D. Landau; E. M. Lifshitz; L. P. Pitaevskii (1984). Electrodynamics of Continuous Media. Vol. 8 (2nd ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2634-7
  .
• L. P. Pitaevskii; E. M. Lifshitz (1980). Statistical Physics, Part 2. Vol. 9 (1st ed.). Butterworth–Heinemann.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2636-1
  .
• L. P. Pitaevskii; E. M. Lifshitz (1981). Physical Kinetics. Vol. 10 (1st ed.). Pergamon Press.
  ISBN 978-0-7506-2635-4
  .

Landau and Lifshitz suggested in the third volume of the Course of Theoretical Physics that the then-standard periodic table had a mistake in it, and that lutetium should be regarded as a d-block rather than an f-block element. Their suggestion was fully vindicated by later findings,^{[53][54][55][56]} and in 1988 was endorsed by a report of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).^[57]

Other

• L. D. Landau;
  ISBN 9780080105864
  .
• L. D. Landau; Ya. Smorodinsky (2011) [1958]. Lectures on Nuclear Theory. Dover Publications.
  ISBN 978-0486675138
  .
• L. D. Landau; G. B. Rumer (2003) [1960]. What is Relativity?. Dover Publications.
  ISBN 978-0-48-616348-2
  .
• L. D. Landau;
  ISBN 978-0-08-009106-8
  .
• L. D. Landau; A. I. Kitaigorodsky (1978). Physics for Everyone. Mir Publishers Moscow. in 4 volumes: volume 1 Physical bodies
  ISBN 978-0-82-851725-6
  ; volume 3 Electrons and volume 4 Photons and nuclei; vols. 3 & 4 by Kitaigorodsky alone

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• List of things named after Lev Landau

References

Further reading

Books

• Dorozynski, Alexander (1965). The Man They Wouldn't Let Die.
  ASIN B0006DC8BA
  . (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.)
• Janouch, Frantisek (1979). Lev D. Landau: His life and work.
  ASIN B0007AUCL0
  .
• Khalatnikov, I. M., ed. (1989). Landau. The physicist and the man. Recollections of L. D. Landau. Sykes, J. B. (trans.).
  ISBN 0-08-036383-0
  .
• Kojevnikov, Alexei B. (2004). Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. History of Modern Physical Sciences.
  ISBN 1-86094-420-5
  .
• Landau-Drobantseva, Kora (1999). Professor Landau: How We Lived (in Russian).
  ISBN 5-8159-0019-2. Archived from the original
  on 4 May 2005.
• Shifman, M., ed. (2013). Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics was Shaping Destinies. World Scientific.
  ISBN 978-981-4436-56-4
  .

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.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Lev Landau", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Lev Davidovich Landau. Nobel-Winners.
• 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
  ISBN 978-1-60692-908-7
  .
• Gennady Gorelik, "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

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