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).

[edit] Biography

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Death

Landau died on April 1, 1968, aged 60, from complications of the injuries from the accident. He was buried at Novodevichy cemetery.^[1][2]

[edit] 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.^[3]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 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.

[edit] Legacy

The minor planet 2142 Landau discovered in 1972 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh is named in his honor.^[4] The lunar crater Landau is named in his honor.

[edit] 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.^[5][6]

[edit] Works

[edit] 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)

[edit] Other books

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

[edit] 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

[edit] 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

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Lev Landau", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Landau_Lev.html .
• 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.

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