Lev Landau

Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian Лев Давидович Ландау; * 9 Januarjul / January 22 1908greg in Baku. . † April 1, 1968 in Moscow) was a Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate.

Life and work

Youth and Education

Landau was the son of an engineer who worked in the oil fields near Baku. As Edmund Landau Landau entstammend of the Jewish family, from the many well-known rabbis and scholars emerged, he finished in 1921, the school and studied from 1922 to the physico- chemical and mathematical faculty of the University of Baku.

In 1924, he joined the Physics Division of the University of Leningrad, where he became assistant to Abram Ioffe. Tight college friends were George Gamow and Dmitri Ivanenko. 1926, his first release. 1929 Landau was awarded a research scholarship to him, Max Born (Göttingen ), Paul Ehrenfest (Leiden ), Werner Heisenberg ( Leipzig) and Wolfgang Pauli ( Zurich ) led. He also visited Niels Bohr ( Copenhagen, where he was after 1929 also 1933 and 1934) and Ernest Rutherford ( Cambridge ). During this time, the collaboration with Rudolf Ernst Peierls developed.

Kharkov years

After his return to Leningrad (1931), Landau took over in 1932 the management of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Physico -Technical Institute at Kharkov University, where in 1933 he also took on a professorship in theoretical physics at the Institute of Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering. Due to its merits him a doctorate in 1934, without proof of dissertation awarded. In 1935 he became Professor of General Physics at the University of Kharkov.

In Moscow

In 1937 he followed a call Pyotr Kapizas at the Physical Institute in Moscow, where he became head of the Department of Theoretical Physics. In April 1938 Landau was arrested by the secret with his friends Moiseja Korez and Yuri Rumer. The reason was by Gennady Gorelik a antistalinistisches (but of socialist pathos worn ) leaflet that he wanted to spread on 1 May with his friends. After his release, in 1939 came the intelligence chief Lavrenty Beria after a courageous intervention of Kapitsa, he returned to the Moscow Institute, where he founded a scientific school, emerged from the few internationally known physicist.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s he worked at the Soviet hydrogen bomb project. He organized the numerical calculations by which they managed a successful prediction of the energy release of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb ( the ideas of Andrei Sakharov after the Slojka ( puff pastry ) design has been built ). Landau was honored for two Stalin prizes ( 1949, 1953) and as a Hero of Socialist Labour ( 1954). In the 1950s he worked at the Institute for Physical Problems of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (later Kapitsa Institute ). As before, we distrusted him by officials, he was allowed to make, for example, despite his eminence no tours abroad, and the management of the Institute remained at Kapitsa. One reason for this was that he did not mince his mouth and remarked often sarcastic.

Landau gave work to almost all areas of modern physics. After early research on quantum mechanics and magnetism he examined in 1930 the diamagnetic properties of metals (eg Landau quantization), in 1935, he formulated a mathematical representation of the magnetization mechanisms in ferromagnets. In one of his first publications in 1927 he introduced the density matrix. In a work on cosmic radiation in 1938 he founded the cascade theory of electron showers. Thereafter Landau started research in the field of low temperature physics. For phase transformations he discovered 1938 at liquid helium the phenomenon of superfluidity, in which a substance from a particular material characteristic transition temperature loses its viscous properties. In 1941 he formulated the theory of superfluidity in a quantum-mechanical basis, with the properties of liquids were first fully described. In 1950 Landau, together with Vitaly Ginzburg phenomenological theory of superconductivity in which the electromagnetic properties of these conductors summarized at the lowest temperatures ( Ginsburg - Landau theory ). Towards the end of the 1950s, Landau worked with his school also elementary theories and quantum field theories, an area he had previously shunned despite the successes of Richard Feynman and others in the West. Here he and several other Soviet physicists, such as Isaak Pomeranchuk succeeded in discovering an inherent problem of quantum electrodynamics, the divergence of the coupling constant with increasing energy ( or in other words the "disappearance of the bare charge "). This meant that quantum field theory was generally regarded in the Russian school, which was heavily dominated by Landau, a long time with strong skepticism.

Together with Yevgeny M. Lifshitz and later some other authors, he wrote a ten -volume, trend-setting textbook of theoretical physics ( in Russia from 1938), the International has a timeless work of high quality a major impact. In the textbook a very broad spectrum of theoretical physics is treated in accordance with the wide-ranging interests of the Landau school. It also reflects the spirit of physics teaching in the Landau - school with its carefully designed exercises. Who would want to get there Access, had a series of written examinations privately with Landau and his staff made ​​that the level well above the state tests were ( " Theoretical Minimum" by Landau and his colleagues called ). Could be testing each by prior arrangement, even without academic prerequisites. His students include Lew Pitajewski, Alexei Abrikosov, Isaac Chalatnikow, Lev Gorkov, Isaac Pomeranchuk, Boris Joffe, Laszlo Tisza, Benjamin G. Levich, Alexander Kompanejez, Evgeny Lifshitz, Roald Sagdejew, Igor Dsjaloschinski, Alexander Pataschinski, Alexander Achijeser, Yakov Abramovich Smorodinski and Semyon Gerschtein. Also well known were the Landau - seminars in which Landau was able to interrupt at any time with probing questions for clarification, which was formally also other permitted. According to an anecdote interrupted Landau when he visited in the 1920s Germany, Albert Einstein, in a lecture on failure. Einstein thought for a moment, confessed the following error of the audience prompting to forget that previously carried forward. Landau estimated Einstein incidentally, is a high. He shared physicist in a logarithmic scale of 0 to 5, a (0 was the highest level), Einstein classified a at 0.5, the fathers of quantum mechanics ( Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Bose, Dirac, Wigner ) at 1, itself initially at 2.5, and relatively late in his career at second

Last years

On January 7, 1962, a tragic accident occurred: On the way from Moscow to Dubna Landau's car came on icy road with an oncoming truck together. Eleven bones and the skull were broken. He wrestled in the subsequent weeks with death and had to be resuscitated at least four times. After three months Landau awoke from the coma. Of the consequences of the accident, however, he was never able to fully recover, and he gained his great creativity not nearly back, despite the support of his many pupils and the Soviet physicist community in its recovery. As the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to him in the same year, he could not answer personally, Lev Landau ultimately died from the effects of the car accident six years later on April 1, 1968 him.

Landau's research group was founded in 1965 for the nucleation of the worldwide known Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka near Moscow. Among its first members belongs to the later Nobel Prize winner Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikossow doing research there until 1988.

Rates, memberships and honors

Landau was a member of many scientific committees and societies, and was highly honored: In 1962 he was awarded for his pioneering work in the theory of condensed matter (especially for liquid helium) the Nobel Prize for physics. 1949 and 1953 he was awarded the Stalin Prize and in 1954 he was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor. In 1960 he received the Fritz London Prize and the Max - Planck medal. In 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Prize with Lifschitz for his textbook series.

Landau was a member of many scientific academies: Since 1946 he was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Royal Danish (1951) and the Dutch Academy of Sciences ( 1956), the Royal Society (1960), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences ( 1960). From 1959 he was an honorary member of the British Institute of Physics. In 1964 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina.

A lunar crater and a minor planet named after him.

The Russian Post was 2008 on the occasion of his 100th birthday, a special stamp.

Writings

• With Lifshitz: Textbook of theoretical physics, German Publisher at German Harri, Frankfurt am Main: Bd.1 mechanics
• Vol.2 Classical Field Theory
• Bd.3 quantum mechanics
• Bd.4 quantum electrodynamics ( with Lew P. Pitajewski, Vladimir B. Berestezki, formerly known as relativistic quantum theory in two parts )
• Vol.5 Statistical Physics, Part 1 ( until the 1970s, only in a band )
• Bd.6 hydrodynamics
• Bd.7 elasticity theory
• Bd.8 electrodynamics of continua
• Bd.9 Statistical Physics, Part 2, Theory of the condensed state, with L. Pitajewski
• Bd.10 Physical Kinetics, ( be treated non-equilibrium processes) with L. Pitajewski

The first German edition appeared in Akademie Verlag, Berlin, from 1957 (edited by Gerhard Heber, later Paul Ziesche ). An English edition appeared in 1958 in the Pergamon Publishing. These first editions only went to this Bd.8. There is also a two-volume edition of Theoretical Physics in Focus, Hanser 1975 ( Vol.1 mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum theory Vol.2 )

More Books by Landau

• Collected Essays, Moscow, Nauka, 1969 ( Russian)
• With Rumer: What's relativity theory, Teubner, 11th Edition 1985?
• Alexander Kitaigorodski: Physics for all 4 volumes, Aulis Verlag 1981-1983 ( Vol.1 Physical body, Vol.2 molecules Bd.3 electrons, photons and nuclei Bd.4 )
• Alexander Ilyich Achijeser, Lifshitz: Mechanics and molecular physics, Akademie Verlag 1970
• With Yakov Abramovich Smorodinski Lectures on Nuclear Theory, New York, 1958, Dover 1993