Lev Davidovich Landau | Biography

Lev Davidovich Landau, known as the last of the "Universalists," was born on January 22, 1908, in Baku on the Caspian Sea. Now the capital of Azerbaijan, Landau's hometown was, at that time, part of the Soviet Union. His parents were educated and well-to-do Russians.

He demonstrated that he was advanced at an early age when he finished school at age 13. In 1922, he enrolled in the University of Baku in the faculties of maths and physics and of chemistry.

In 1924, Landau transferred to the University of Leningrad to enroll in its department of physics. While still an undergraduate, in 1926, Landau also became a supernumerary graduate student at Leningrad's Physicotechnical Institute. That same year, his first scientific paper, "On the Theory of the Spectra of Diatomic Molecules," was published to considerable interest.

Upon graduating from the university the following year, he joined the Physicotechnical Institute as a fully fledged graduate student. This was where he first came into contact with a group of other theoreticians and with "big physics," as the new quantum mechanics was known. In 1927, he published a paper entitled, "The Damping Problem in Wave Mechanics." It was the first time that anyone had described the quantum state of systems with the aid of the density matrices.

In 1929, Landau made his first trip abroad. Over a period of 18 months, he visited Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, England, Belgium, and Holland, meeting all the great physicists of the day with the exception of the one that he, perhaps, admired the most and was most often compared to Enrico Fermi.

The bulk of his time was spent in Copenhagen at Niels Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics. He was surrounded by the top names in the field, including Wolfgang Pauli, George Gamow, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Felix Bloch, and Paul Ehrenfest. By 1930, when Landau came to Denmark, the basics of quantum mechanics had already been figured out. Nonetheless, he subsequently managed to find enough unsolved problems to keep him busy throughout his life.

Bohr influenced Landau more than any other physicist. The Russian often said of his Danish mentor that he was his only teacher. Their relationship was mutually respectful and lifelong.

In Cambridge, Landau worked with the New Zealand-born Cavendish professor, Ernest Rutherford. Here, he met for the first time his fellow Russian, Pyotr Kapitsa, and developed his theory of the diamagnetism of metals. This predicted the occurrence of unusual magnetic properties of free electrons in metals.

In Zurich, he worked with the German physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In Zurich, too, he wrote two important and well received papers with the German physicist Rudolf Peirels, one of which pertained to relativistic quantum theory.

Returning to Leningrad in 1931, he determined to begin teaching, as well as to continue his own work. First, he worked closely with Matvey Bronstein at the Physicotechnical Institute, before moving to Ukraine in 1932 to head the Theoretical Institute at its then capital, Kharkov. Here, finally, Landau was able to realize his wish to teach. Kharkov was where Landau devised his first "theoretical minimum" program in physics for members of the institute staff and began work on his magnum opus, the Course of Theoretical Physics, which remains, long after Landau's death, the bible of theoretical physics. These volumes, covering the spectra of the field, testify, perhaps more than anything else Landau produced, to his genius. The course was co-written with one of Landau's favorite pupils, Evgeny Lifshitz.

The theoretical minimum was an examination, with nine component parts, covering all of theoretical physics, including the necessary maths. It was Landau's conception of the minimum a theoretician should know before he would accept him as a pupil. Just how unusual it was can be gauged by the fact that the traditional approach is to view physics as a series of specialities. Not Landau. For him, physics was an indivisible whole, and anyone serious about studying under him had to prove that they, like him, were capable of moving with ease between the various branches.

In 1935, he accepted the chair of General Physics at the University of Kharkov. In addition to his administrative and teaching duties, he took a close interest in the groundbreaking work on low-temperature physics which was being carried out at the university. Landau's angle was the behavior of matter at low temperatures. He published four papers on the topic during this period.

He married Kora Drobantseva in 1937. They had one son, Igor, who went on to become an experimental physicist.

Landau and Kora moved to Moscow in 1937, where Kapitsa had invited him to head the theoretical division at the Institute of Physical Problems. He continued working on a range of theoretical problems, being interrupted only briefly during the Second World War when the Institute was evacuated to Kazan. There, Landau devised theories and made calculations of the processes governing the efficiency of armaments and published three papers on the detonation of explosives.

When the war ended, Landau resumed his work on superfluidity. He succeeded in explaining various properties of liquid helium-4 mathematically; for instance, he explained why the element flows without friction below a temperature of 2 degrees Kelvin and has a thermal conductivity 800 times greater than copper at room temperature. This work laid the groundwork for later research into superconductivity, that is, the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in certain metals at temperatures near absolute zero. He forecast that sound would travel at two speeds in liquid helium; at that of a familiar pressure wave and at that of a temperature wave. This theory was experimentally verified in 1944 by the Russian scientist, Vasily Peshkov. Landau also continued to work for the government's nuclear weapons program.

In 1945, Landau investigated shock waves for the engineering company of the Soviet Army. The following year, he turned his attention to the oscillation of plasmas. He predicted that the isotope helium-3 would show unique properties at a temperature near absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, including a wave propagation called "zero sound" and sudden spinning.

Landau received many honors during his lifetime, including The State Prize three times and the Lenin Prize once. He was twice awarded the Order of Lenin, was elected an honorary member of the British Institute of Physics and Physical Society, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Danish and Netherlands Royal Academies of Sciences. He received the Max Planck Medal, the Fritz London Prize, and the Nobel Prize in physics.

Landau's career was brought to a tragic and abrupt halt on January 7, 1962, when he was involved in a car crash. He survived, but was so badly injured that he could never work again. Landau was still confined to his bed when it was announced that he had won the 1962 Nobel Prize in physics for his groundbreaking research into theories of condensed matter, especially liquid helium. He spent the remaining years of his life battling his injuries until he died on April 1, 1968.