- Person
- Lev Landau
- Lived
- 1908–1968
- Field
- Theoretical Physics
- From
- Soviet
The story
In 1932 Lev Landau, then just 24, moved to Kharkiv to head the theoretical department of the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute, founded a few years earlier as a centre for nuclear and condensed-matter physics. He also lectured at Kharkiv's university and polytechnic. Within a few years he had made Kharkiv the centre of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union, and in 1937 he moved to Moscow to lead the theory division of the Institute for Physical Problems, where he continued to build his school.
Joining the Landau school required passing the Theoretical Minimum, a series of demanding oral examinations covering all of theoretical physics, from mechanics and field theory to quantum mechanics and statistical physics. Landau believed a real theorist had to command the whole subject. Students spent a long time preparing, and the future physicist Boris Ioffe took almost two years to pass. Between 1934 and 1961 only 43 candidates succeeded, but those who did became notable theoretical physicists.
Passing the exams brought obligations rather than privileges. Members of Landau's famous seminar took turns, in alphabetical order, to review a dozen recent papers from every branch of physics chosen by Landau from the latest Physical Review. They had to understand how each result was obtained and judge whether it was reliable, and anyone presenting new theoretical work had first to convince Landau privately.
His students included Evgeny Lifshitz, Alexei Abrikosov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Isaak Pomeranchuk, Lev Gor'kov, Lev Pitaevskii and Roald Sagdeev. After Landau was gravely injured in a car accident in 1962, his former students and co-workers founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka near Moscow in the mid-1960s to keep the school alive. Khalatnikov led it until 1992.
The institute grew to about a hundred scientists and became one of the world's best-known centres for theoretical physics. Its members have included the Nobel laureate Abrikosov and leading theorists such as Alexander Polyakov and Alexei Kitaev. Even when many of its scientists moved abroad in the 1990s, most kept their ties, forming an international network in the tradition of the Landau school.
Why it matters
Landau's school produced generations of leading physicists, including a Nobel laureate, and shaped theoretical physics in the Soviet Union and beyond.
About Lev Landau
Baku-born prodigy who founded the great Soviet school of theoretical physics, survived Stalin’s prison, explained superfluid helium and won the 1962 Nobel Prize.
More about Lev Landau
- Lev Landau predicted a strange way plasma waves fadeIn 1946 Lev Landau predicted that waves in a plasma can lose energy without any collisions, an effect confirmed experimentally in 1964 and now called Landau damping.
- Landau co-discovered the quantum density matrixIn the late 1920s, while still a teenager, Lev Landau independently introduced the density matrix, a basic tool of quantum physics, alongside John von Neumann.
- Lev Landau explained frictionless superfluid heliumLev Landau explained why liquid helium flows without friction below 2.17 K, introducing phonons and 'rotons'; it won him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Landau's Fermi liquid theory explains metalsIn 1956 Lev Landau introduced Fermi liquid theory, explaining why electrons in metals and atoms in liquid helium-3 behave almost like free particles.
- The Ginzburg–Landau theory explains superconductorsLev Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg created the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, work that helped win Ginzburg and Landau's student Abrikosov the 2003 Nobel Prize.
- Landau levels underpin the quantum Hall effectIn 1930 Lev Landau showed that electrons in a magnetic field occupy discrete energy levels, now called Landau levels, key to explaining the quantum Hall effect.
- Landau and Lifshitz wrote physics' great textbook seriesWith his student Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Landau began the ten-volume Course of Theoretical Physics, still used by graduate physics students worldwide.
- Landau's theory explains how matter changes stateLev Landau's theory of second-order phase transitions introduced the 'order parameter', still a broad and powerful framework for how matter changes state.
Sources
- Lev Landau Wikipedia
- Lev Davidovich Landau MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.