A prodigy in Baku
Lev Davidovich Landau was born on January 22, 1908, in Baku, on the Caspian Sea, then part of the Russian Empire and today the capital of Azerbaijan. Both his parents were Jewish. His father, David Lvovich Landau, was an engineer in Baku’s booming oil industry and an amateur mathematician; his mother, Lyubov Veniaminovna Harkavi, had trained as a physician. He had an elder sister, Sonya.
His gift appeared early. In September 1916, aged eight, he entered a Jewish high school in Baku. He learned differential calculus at twelve and integral calculus at thirteen, and finished school at thirteen, too young for university, so his father placed him for a year in a technical college of economics in the hope that he would choose a practical career. It did not take. In 1922, at fourteen, Landau entered Baku University, studying physics, mathematics and chemistry at once.
Leningrad and the new physics
In 1924 he moved to Leningrad State University, then the centre of Soviet physics, graduating in 1927. He arrived at the perfect moment: quantum mechanics was being born in Germany, Denmark and Britain, and the teenage Landau threw himself into it, publishing his first paper in 1926 while still an undergraduate. In 1927 he was working on the density matrix, a mathematical tool for describing quantum systems that was introduced independently by John von Neumann and remains fundamental to quantum physics.
In 1929 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and Soviet support allowed him to spend some eighteen months abroad. He worked with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen on three visits in 1930 and 1931, and also in Cambridge, where Paul Dirac was based, and in Zürich with Wolfgang Pauli’s circle and Rudolf Peierls. During these travels he produced his theory of the diamagnetism of electrons in metals, which introduced the quantised energy levels of electrons in a magnetic field now called Landau levels, today central to understanding the quantum Hall effect.
Kharkiv and the Landau school
In 1932 Landau moved to Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, to head the theoretical department of the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute. He received his doctorate in 1934 and became a professor in 1935. In Kharkiv he founded what became the most famous school of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union.
Admission was by examination. Landau devised the “Theoretical Minimum” a series of oral exams covering the whole of theoretical physics, which a student had to pass before he would accept them; only forty-three candidates passed between 1934 and 1961. Those who did joined a demanding, irreverent, intensely loyal circle. Evgeny Lifshitz, who began his doctorate under Landau in 1933, became his closest collaborator, and together they began the Course of Theoretical Physics, a ten-volume series that set out the subject from mechanics to quantum electrodynamics. Completed by Lifshitz and colleagues in 1979, after Landau’s death, “Landau and Lifshitz” is still on the shelves of physicists worldwide.
Landau was also famous for ranking physicists on a logarithmic scale. Newton stood at 0, Einstein at 0.5, the founders of quantum mechanics such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Dirac at 1. Those at the bottom, at 5, he called “pathologists.” He placed himself at 2.5, later promoting himself to 2. The joke had a serious point: Landau believed that physics was a single, unified discipline, that a real theorist had to master all of it, and that clarity and honesty about one’s own limits were part of the job. Even gifted students found the bar high, the future physicist Boris Ioffe took almost two years to pass the Theoretical Minimum, but those who cleared it became members of a school that would dominate Soviet theoretical physics for half a century.
Prison under Stalin
The Great Terror reached the Kharkiv institute in the mid-1930s, and several of its scientists were arrested and shot. Landau, who was investigated in the case, escaped Kharkiv in 1937 by moving to Moscow, where Pyotr Kapitsa appointed him head of the theoretical division of his new Institute for Physical Problems.
Moscow was no refuge. On April 28, 1938, Landau was arrested by the NKVD, accused over a leaflet that compared Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism. He was held in the Lubyanka prison, where, after some two months of interrogation, enforced prolonged standing and threats, he signed a confession. He might well have died there. Kapitsa intervened with extraordinary courage, writing to Stalin and threatening to stop his own work unless Landau was released; Niels Bohr also wrote to Stalin. In April 1939, after a year in prison, Landau was freed and returned to work at Kapitsa’s institute.
Superfluid helium and a torrent of ideas
Released, Landau turned at once to the puzzle Kapitsa had just uncovered: below about 2.17 degrees above absolute zero, liquid helium flows without any friction at all. In 1941 Landau produced a theory of this superfluidity, describing the liquid as a quantum system whose excitations, sound-like “phonons” and the particle-like “rotons” he introduced, explain why it can flow without resistance. It was for this work that he would receive the Nobel Prize, “for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium.”
His output in these decades was staggering in breadth. His general theory of second-order phase transitions (1937) introduced the idea of an order parameter, the framework physicists still use to describe how matter changes state. With Vitaly Ginzburg he created the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity (1950). He developed Fermi liquid theory to explain the behaviour of interacting electrons in metals and of liquid helium-3; discovered Landau damping, a subtle mechanism by which waves in a plasma lose energy without collisions; and identified the “Landau pole” a fundamental problem in quantum field theory. He also contributed to the theory of combustion and of turbulence.
The bomb and the Soviet state
Like most leading Soviet physicists, Landau was drawn into the atomic project after 1945. He led a group of mathematicians performing calculations for the Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs, work for which he received Stalin Prizes in 1949 and 1953 and the title Hero of Socialist Labour in 1954. As a young man, in 1935, he had written of the “unprecedented opportunities for the development of physics in our country, provided by the Party and the government”; a year in Stalin’s prison had shown him the other face of that state.
Landau’s family was Jewish and he was identified as a Jew under the Soviet system, but he was not religious and is generally described as an atheist. A 1965 letter published under his name and that of the economist Evsei Liberman, opposing American intervention on behalf of Soviet Jews, has been doubted as genuinely his.
The man
Landau was known for his sharp humour, his contempt for pomposity and his habit of judging work in blunt terms. A student remembered him dismissing a paper with the verdict that its author did not understand what he had done. He held unconventional views on relationships, rejecting monogamy in favour of what he called free love and urging it on his wife and students, though his wife, Kora Drobantseva, was not enthusiastic. They had met in Kharkiv, lived together from the mid-1930s and formalised their union in 1946, the year their son Igor was born; Igor Landau became a physicist.
The accident
On January 7, 1962, Landau was being driven from Moscow to the nuclear research centre at Dubna when the car skidded on an icy road and struck a truck. He suffered serious fractures and internal injuries and was unconscious for weeks, about two months, by some accounts, and he was declared clinically dead several times before reviving. Later that year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, but his injuries prevented him from receiving it in person.
He survived, but the brilliant mind never returned to creative work. He died in Moscow on April 1, 1968, after surgery for an intestinal blockage, at the age of sixty.
Legacy
Landau’s influence runs through modern physics. Landau levels, Landau damping, the Landau theory of phase transitions, Fermi liquid theory and the Ginzburg–Landau equations are standard tools taught in every graduate physics programme; the Ginzburg–Landau theory helped bring Vitaly Ginzburg and Landau’s student Alexei Abrikosov the Nobel Prize in 2003. The L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics near Moscow was founded in 1965 in his honour, and an asteroid and a lunar crater bear his name. In 2019, on what would have been his 111th birthday, Google marked his life with a Doodle.
Perhaps his greatest creation was a community. Through the Theoretical Minimum, his seminar and the Course of Theoretical Physics, Landau formed generations of physicists and set a standard of universal competence, the idea that a theorist should command the whole of physics, that shaped Soviet and Russian science for decades. A Jewish boy from the oil city of Baku, imprisoned by Stalin and saved by a colleague’s courage, became one of the last great universal physicists of the twentieth century.
Sources & further reading
Lev Landau, Wikipedia · Lev Davidovich Landau, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews · File:Landau.jpg, Wikimedia Commons (Nobel Foundation portrait) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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