Evgeny Lifshitz

Yevgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz (Russian: Евгений Михайлович Лифшиц, Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz English transcription, born February 21, 1915 in Kharkov, Russian Empire; † 29 October 1985 in Moscow) was a Soviet physicist.

Life and work

Lifshitz was the son of a medical professor at Kharkov and studied in 1929 initially on a chemistry - school and then at the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics at the Mechanical Engineering Institute in Kharkov. In 1933 he received his diploma and then became a student of Lev Landau at the Physical -Technical Institute in Kharkov, where he received his doctorate in 1934. After that, he was a research assistant there in 1939 and earned his Russian doctorate ( Habilitation ) at the University of Saint Petersburg. From 1939 he worked at the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He also taught, inter alia, at Kharkov University, the Institute of Chemical Technology and the Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Kharkov, the Moscow State University and the Moscow Pedagogical Institute.

Lifshitz is well known in the field of general relativity for his contributions to the BKL singularity ( Belinski - Chalatnikow - Lifshitz singularity ). Even into 2006, this is regarded as one of the important open problems of classical theory of gravitation.

After the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, 1948, the effect of the later named after him strength predicted, according to which uncharged, extremely close parallel arranged metal plates between which a vacuum is put on, Lifschitz advanced this theory in 1956. Lifshitz predicted that the Casimir force is able to act not only attractive, but also repulsive. He calculated the force to exercise the two uncharged objects of any material on each other when in between is an electrically polarizable medium. It was only in 2008 that presumption by Federico Capasso and his colleagues at Harvard University, was confirmed.

Together with Lev Landau (and later some other co-authors, the work was completed only in 1979 ) he wrote the ten-volume "Textbook of theoretical physics ", which became trend around the world. He was a student and one of the closest collaborators of Landau and belonged to the so-called Moscow school of theoretical physics.

Since 1966 he was a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1954 he was awarded the State Prize and in 1962 with the Landau Lenin Prize for their course in theoretical physics. In 1974 he was awarded the Landau Prize in 1958 and the Lomonosov Prize. Lifshitz was long -time editor of the Russian Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics ( Журнал экспериментальной и теоретической физики ).