Lev Davidovich Landau

Soviet physicist

• Born: January 22, 1908; Baku, Azerbaijan, Russian Empire
• Died: April 1, 1968; Moscow, Soviet Union (now Russia)

Landau contributed to the development of quantum mechanics and its applications to the physical world. Among his major achievements are the development of the theory of phase transitions and his explanation of the behavior of quantum liquids such as liquid helium in the superfluid state. Landau’s contributions to the theory of quantum liquids earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962.

Primary fields: Physics; mathematics

Specialties: Theoretical physics; quantum mechanics

Early Life

Lev Davidovich Landau was born in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan but was part of the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union during Landau’s life. His father was the chief engineer at an oil field in Baku, and his mother was a physician and a teacher. After finishing high school at the age of thirteen, Landau wanted to go to the University of Baku to study mathematics. However, Landau’s father wanted him to have a career in finance or administration and so sent Landau to the Baku Economics Technicum. Landau refused to continue his studies there after the first year, and so in 1922 his father sent him to the University of Baku. There, Landau studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics. At the age of sixteen, he went to Leningrad State University, where he studied physics. Landau published his first scientific paper at the age of eighteen on the spectra of diatomic molecules. While Landau was a student at the university, he had a research scholarship at the Leningrad Röntgen Institute, where he worked on the developing science of quantum mechanics.

In 1929, Landau received a traveling fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship, which enabled him to travel in Western Europe for eighteen months. During that time he met and worked with many of the developers of quantum mechanics and eventually became renowned as an outstanding theoretical physicist. This trip marked the beginning of Landau’s scientific career.

Landau spent some of his time in Copenhagen at the Niels Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics, where much of the theory of quantum mechanics was being developed. Landau came to admire Bohr and regarded him as his teacher. In fact, the theoretical seminar that Landau ultimately developed was strongly reminiscent of Bohr’s methods. Landau worked on a variety of problems at the institute, where he collaborated with Rudolf Peierls on a joint paper discussing problems in quantum electrodynamics. Landau’s international reputation began to grow.

Life’s Work

On his return to the Soviet Union in 1931, Landau returned to Leningrad, then still the center of Soviet physics, and became a researcher and professor at his former university. Landau had returned to Leningrad with definite ideas about the way in which theoretical physics should be taught, but he encountered difficulties in the implementation of his program. In 1932, he was appointed head of the Theoretical Physics Division of the Ukrainian Physicotechnical Institute in Kharkov. Here Landau was able to put his methods into practice, developing his own way of doing theoretical physics.

At Kharkov, Landau devised an academic examination for theoretical physicists known as the theoretical minimum. This eventually led to the multivolume textbook on theoretical physics, written with Landau’s student Evgenii Lifshitz. This work had a significant effect on the way advanced physics is taught all over the world and influenced the research style of a whole generation of theoretical physicists. At Kharkov, Landau solved many problems in a variety of fields dealing with experimental physics. Landau published numerous studies in this period, dealing with low-temperature physics, acoustics, superconductivity, the photoelectric effect, and a wide range of other topics. Also at Kharkov, Landau first organized his theoretical seminar, in which Landau’s students and coworkers reported on their own work and on the latest work of other researchers appearing in scientific journals. These seminars covered a wide range of topics and became Landau’s chief source of scientific information for his own research; the seminars were also a valuable teaching tool, as Landau’s students were able to observe the way Landau approached problems.

Around this time, Landau was awarded a doctorate by Leningrad State University; he also met his future wife, Concordia “Cora” Drobantseva, at Kharkov, where she was an engineer in a chocolate factory. They married in 1937.

Also in 1937, Soviet physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa invited Landau to become the head of the theoretical division of the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow. The institute had been recently formed by Kapitsa, who had earlier been prevented by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin from returning to his Cambridge laboratory in England, where he had worked with Ernest Rutherford. Landau remained at this institute for most of his active career.

In 1937, Kapitsa resumed the work he had been pursuing at Cambridge on low-temperature physics and was investigating the superfluid properties of liquid helium at low temperatures. Landau then began his work on quantum liquids, for which he was to win the Nobel Prize in 1962. As a result of the findings of Kapitsa’s experiments, Landau realized that the behavior of liquid helium at these low temperatures had features in common with the onset of the superconducting state, and that the properties that liquid helium exhibited at low temperatures were the result of large-scale quantum behavior. In the course of this work, Landau began to develop his theory of phase transitions, that is, the study of matter as it changes from one state to another, such as from solid into liquid.

In 1938, Landau was sentenced to ten years in prison on the allegation that he was a German spy. Landau remained in prison for almost a year and was eventually released when Kapitsa interceded with Soviet politician Vyacheslav Molotov on his behalf. Landau returned to his work at the institute, where, along with many other leading scientists, he was involved with war work; after the war, he published several papers on the detonation of explosives.

By the end of the war, Landau was the Soviet Union’s leading theoretical physicist. Between 1946 and 1960, he became a member of several science academies, including the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London. In these years he also received two Orders of Lenin and three state prizes and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor. In 1962, he received the Lenin Prize as well as the Nobel Prize.

In the postwar years, Landau worked on a wide variety of problems, making fundamental contributions to nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and fluid dynamics. He continued his work on liquid helium and on other quantum liquids as well. Landau was also interested in education at all levels, and he planned to write textbooks to educate physicists.

Landau’s scientific career came to an end in 1962 when he was involved in a serious traffic accident. The car he was riding in was struck by a truck, leaving him with severe injuries; Landau survived to receive the Nobel Prize, even though he was still in the hospital a year after it was awarded. He eventually left the hospital but never worked seriously again. He died around six years after his accident.

Impact

Landau’s contributions to twentieth-century physics are of enduring importance. Few physicists have made fundamental contributions to such a wide variety of fields. His greatest contribution to physics, however, may well have been his teaching. Landau was one of the major figures involved in the rise of Soviet physics. His former coworkers and pupils included many of the leading Soviet theoretical physicists, and his textbooks have had a worldwide impact on the teaching of theoretical physics.

Landau’s contributions to physics have shown that a mastery of the mathematical structure of theoretical physics can enable a physicist to work creatively on a variety of different problems. He has shown that the key to scientific progress is to identify the parts of the problem that are fundamental and to ignore the rest.

Bibliography

Cline, Barbara L. Men Who Made a New Physics: Physicists and the Quantum Theory. 1969. Rev. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print. A historical study of the development of quantum theory, providing an introduction to Landau’s theoretical framework.

Dardo, Mauro. Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Chronicles major developments in physics since 1901, the year the first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded. Includes information about the work of Landau and other prizewinners.

Okun, Lev B. Energy and Mass in Relativity Theory. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2009. Print. Discusses the developments made by international scientists, including Landau, that led to the theory of relativity and related conclusions.