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Lev Davidovich Landau

Academician L.D. Landau is considered a legendary figure in the history of Russian and world science. Quantum mechanics, solid state physics, magnetism, low temperature physics, superconductivity and superfluidity, cosmic ray physics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum field theory, atomic nucleus physics and elementary particle physics, theory of chemical reactions, plasma physics list of areas that L.D. made a fundamental contribution to Landau. It was said about him that “there were no locked doors for him in the huge building of 20th-century physics.”

Lev Davidovich Landau was born on January 22, 1908 in Baku. Father, David L. Landau, an oil engineer, came from a wealthy family. When the son was born, the father was over forty years old, and at that time he held a large position as the chief engineer of one of the Baku oil fields. Mother, Lyubov Veniaminovna Garkavi-Landau, was ten years younger than her husband. She grew up in a poor family, but with constant work, colossal perseverance and excellent abilities paved her way. In 1898 she graduated from the Midwifery Institute in St. Petersburg, six years later - the St. Petersburg Women's Medical Institute.

Leo was the second child in the family, before his daughter Sophia was born. Already at four and a half years old the boy was able to read, write and count. At the age of eight, he entered the gymnasium, where he soon became the first student in the field of natural sciences. He graduated from school at the age of thirteen. And interest and ability to exact sciences, most of all to mathematics, showed even earlier. “He wasn’t a child prodigy,” Landau said about himself, “while studying at school, didn’t get marks above triples in essays. He was interested in mathematics. All theoretical physicists came to science from mathematics, and I was no exception. At twelve I knew how to differentiate, and at thirteen integrate."

Parents thought that thirteen years old was too early for admission to the university (and Landau looked like a very young boy then). And a year he studied with his sister at an economic college. But the next fall, in 1922, Landau became a student at Baku University, and at once two faculties - physics and mathematics and chemistry. In 1922, Lev Landau entered Baku University, where he studied at two faculties simultaneously for two years: in physics and mathematics and in chemistry. After transferring to the physics department of Leningrad University in 1924, Landau did not continue his chemical education. However, interest in chemistry has been preserved for life and often amazed by a good knowledge of chemistry.

According to friends in his youth, he was very shy, and therefore it was difficult for him to communicate with other people. Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa said: “Shyness passed with age, but Landau never developed his ability to adapt to society. Only Landau’s exceptional all-round giftedness attracted people to him, and as they got closer to him they began to love him and find great pleasure in communicating with him ... The uncompromising nature that is characteristic of all the prominent scientists in their scientific work extended to human relations among Landau, but those who knew Lev Landau closely knew what was hiding behind this sharpness a very kind and helpful person, always ready to help the unjustly offended."

Landau was a man of strong passions and hated philistinism most of all, and perhaps loudest. Selfishness, the pursuit of wealth and well-being, in the name of which sacrifice honor, decency, professional interests, - this invariably provoked fierce condemnation from him. Anna Alekseevna Kapitsa, who had a very restrained relationship with Landau in her youth, told how Niels Bohr's wife Margaret convinced her that she did not understand Dau is wrong and unfair to him. Margaret said how kind he is, thin, soft, with a big soul and, moreover, vulnerable, defenseless.

Working in the legendary Leningrad PhysTech in 1929-1931. Landau received a long foreign trip from the People's Commissariat of Education for an internship in the best scientific centers of the world in theoretical physics. He traveled to Germany, England, Switzerland and Denmark. In Denmark, Landau's talent made a strong impression on one of the founders of quantum mechanics of the great physicist Niels Bohr. Landau stayed with him for a long time and joined the so-called Copenhagen Bohr School of Theoretical Physics. All his future life, he proudly considered himself a student of Bohr. In addition to Copenhagen, Landau worked in Zurich with Wolfgang Pauli and in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford. Whether it was Pauli’s influence or just a coincidence, but physicists who knew well both Pauli and Landau noted the similarity in the nature of their thinking.

At the beginning of 1932 L.D. Landau and G.A. They are trying to organize the Gamov Institute for Theoretical Physics "for themselves", into the director of which they propose Gamov, who has been put forward as an academician for this purpose. From the filing of the director of LFTI academician A.F. Joffe government and academy rejected the project. L.D. Landau, arguing with A.F. Ioffe (whom he didn’t put in anything) moved to Kharkov, where until 1937 he headed the theoretical department of the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology and at the same time headed the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Kharkov Institute of Mechanical Engineering, and since 1935 - the Department of General Physics Kharkov University.

For the first few years, a wonderful scientific atmosphere reigned at UFTI. A group of talented young people with a passion for science gathered around Landau. In Kharkov, international physical conferences attended by major Western scientists were held. During the years of Landau's stay in Kharkov, this city became one of the centers of theoretical physics. The origins of many other things in Landau's life are connected with Kharkov - this period was its great and significant head. Here for the first time he organizes a theoretical seminar. He is developing the first theoretical minimum program in physics for employees of the institute. A huge work was conceived and started here - the creation of a Course in Theoretical Physics. Everything that later came to be called the "Landau School" originated in Kharkov.

Since 1935, the situation at the UVTI has tragically changed. Terror, which swept the country in the second half of the 30s, did not pass UFTI. The fabricated “cases” culminated in the arrests and executions of a number of leading employees of the institute. Landau was not arrested at the time, but the threat of arrest was real. This made him "run away" from Kharkov. Fortunately, Landau received an invitation from Kapitsa to take the post of head of the theoretical department of the Institute of Physical Problems. In Moscow, a wave of terror reached Landau only a year later, and he survived only thanks to Kapitsa.

In April 1938, L.D. Landau in Moscow had a leaflet calling for the overthrow of the Stalinist regime, in which Stalin is called the fascist dictator. The text of the leaflet was handed over to the anti-Stalinist group of students for distribution by mail before the May Day holidays. This intention was disclosed by the state security organs of the USSR. Landau, Koretsa and Yu.B. Rumer were arrested on the morning of April 28 for anti-Soviet agitation. On May 3, 1938, Landau was removed from the list of IFP employees.

Landau spent a year in prison and was released thanks to a letter in his defense from Niels Bohr and the intervention of P. Kapitsa, who took Landau “on bail”. On April 26, 1939, P. Kapitsa wrote to L. Beria: “I ask you to release from custody the arrested professor of physics Lev Davidovich Landau under my personal guarantee. I guarantee the NKVD that Landau will not carry out any counter-revolutionary activities at my institute, and I will take all measures that depend on me to ensure that he does not carry out any counter-revolutionary work outside the institute. In the event that I notice from Landau any statements aimed at the detriment of the Soviet regime, I will immediately inform the NKVD authorities about this. ” Two days later L.D. Landau was reinstated on the IFP staff list. After his release and until his death, L.D. Landau remained an employee of the Institute for Physical Problems.

Thanks to the tremendous efforts of Kapitza, Landau was freed. True, the charge was not dropped from him, but simply handed over to Kapitsa. According to one of the first students of Landau A.I. Akhiezer, "we all must bow before the courage and courage of Kapitsa, this great man and scientist. After all, this was truly a feat at that difficult time. In any other institution, the day after the arrest of the "enemy of the people" a general meeting of employees was convened, at which the head, beating his chest, thanked the "Yezhov" bodies for helping to expose the "evil enemy of the people who was quietly hiding in our team." But Kapitsa did not gather a general meeting, did not beat himself in the chest and did not repent of sins that he did not commit, and with the greatest courage and courage rushed to the rescue of an innocent man. And he won. The whole scientific world owes him for this".

Landau was never a party member. But he sincerely believed that the revolution would destroy all the bourgeois prejudices to which he had great contempt, as well as undeserved privileges. He naively believed that a bright future was open to people. The father of the American hydrogen bomb, E. Teller, who met Lev Davidovich during their joint stay in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, called the the "Fiery Communist". Explaining his intention to work on the hydrogen bomb, Teller cited one of the reasons for “psychological shock when Stalin imprisoned my good friend, an outstanding physicist Lev Landau. He was a fiery communist, and I knew him from Leipzig and Copenhagen. I came to conclude that Stalinist communism was no better than Hitler's Nazi dictatorship. "

Stalin and Beria were not mistaken in Landau, having let him out on bail to Kapitsa in April 1939. Landau no longer took any public action against the leader and his regime. But the most important thing: he provided, albeit forcedly, assistance to Stalin and the Soviet country of great importance - he took part in the Atomic Project. At the same time, Landau pulled the weight of his personal contribution to two Stalin Prizes and the Golden Star of the Hero. Landau sometimes wore it, not without pride showing it to others, especially ladies, officials and service workers.

At the beginning of 1941 L.D. Landau was nominated for election as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Presentation to him was then given by Academician V.A. Fock. Kapitsa joined Fock's review of Landau's scientific achievements. This time, Landau was not elected. But in 1946 he was immediately elected to the academics, bypassing the step of a corresponding member. This had almost never happened at the Academy of Sciences. But three years earlier, I.V.Kurchatov was elected in the same way. Obviously, in the case of Landau, the support of the authorities also played a significant role, since from the second half of 1946 Landau was connected to the atomic bomb calculations.

In 1946-1953 L.D. Landau was involved in the Soviet Atomic Project. He participated in the calculations of the RDS-1 charge, as well as in the construction of the theory of the RDS-6s thermonuclear charge. He was awarded three Stalin Prizes for his work in the Atomic Project (1946, 1949, 1953), was awarded the Order of Lenin (1949), and was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor (1954). The last award marked the completion of L.D. Landau in "secret" research.

After the death of I.V. Stalin L.D. Landau clearly articulated his desire to stop working on classified topics and achieved this. According to direct testimony of Landau, he did not feel a trace of enthusiasm, participating in the indisputably heroic epic of the creation of Soviet nuclear weapons. They were driven only by civic duty and incorruptible scientific honesty. At the beginning of the 1950s, he said: “... you must use all your strength so as not to get into the thick of atomic affairs ... The purpose of an intelligent person is to remove from the tasks set by the state, especially the Soviet state, which is built on oppression. "

Kapitsa said: “I did not see any obstacles so that a special large institute of theoretical physics would be created for the Landau Academy of Sciences on the scale that he only wished, but he always not only rejected these proposals, but even refused to discuss them. He said, that he is happy to be a member of the team of our experimental institute. " “Without experimenters, theorists turn sour,” Landau often repeated. Not interrupted, but continued to be still close and organic his connection with the experimenters, lively and everyday. And he always cherished such a connection, he needed it. Finally, here, in his house, he was one of the most active participants in the “kapichnik” workshop, where work was not reported from any areas of physics and related sciences.

Lifshits wrote about Landau: “He told me how shocked he was by the incredible beauty of the general theory of relativity (sometimes he even said that such admiration at the first acquaintance with this theory should, in his opinion, be a sign of any born theoretical physicist). He also talked about the state of ecstasy, which led him to study articles by Heisenberg and Schrödinger, which marked the birth of a new quantum mechanics. He said that they gave him not only pleasure in true scientific beauty, but also a keen sense of the power of human genius, the greatest triumph of which is that a person is able to understand things that he is no longer able to imagine. And, of course, these are exactly the curvature of spacetime and the principle of uncertainty".

Landau's scientific career was truly outstanding: he was interested in quantum mechanics, solid state physics, magnetism, low temperature physics, cosmic ray physics, hydrodynamics, quantum field theory, atomic nucleus physics and particle physics, plasma physics ... As a graduate student, young a man took part in a scientific trip to continue his education in Denmark with N. Bohr, as well as Germany, England and Switzerland. Bora, with whom Landau managed to work during a business trip, he considered his only and main teacher.

Landau had a completely uncompromising attitude towards work and judgment, which seemed to him wrong. And he openly and rather sharply expressed it, despite his faces. So the Nobel laureate V. Raman was furious with Landau's remarks, which he made at his presentation at the Kapitsa seminar, and literally pushed Landau out of the seminar. Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa recalled: “When talking about scientific work or about scientists, Landau was always ready to give his own assessment, which was usually witty and clearly formulated. Especially witty Landau was in his negative assessments. Such assessments quickly spread and finally reached the object of evaluation. Of course, this complicated relations with people for Landau, especially when the object of criticism occupied a responsible position in the academic environment."

The contribution made by Lev Danilovich Landau to the development of physics as a science cannot be overestimated. So, Landau was elected a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, was awarded many orders and medals, and became the laureate of the State Prize three times, Hero of Socialist Labor. He becomes a member of the British Physical Society and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, is elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and becomes a member of the Danish and Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He is awarded the Max Planck Medal, the Fritz London Prize and the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The scientific legacy of an outstanding theoretical physicist is striking in its diversity. The subject of his work covers all physics as a science, beginning with hydrodynamics and ending with quantum field theory. The Ginzburg-Landau and Landau-Lifshitz equations, the Fermi-liquid theory, the energy spectrum of superfluid helium, the study of the fundamentals of quantum electrodynamics, the Landau energy levels of an electron in a magnetic field, the Landau damping, an order parameter for describing second-order phase transitions, and many other discoveries of a brilliant scientist before are still actively used in modern physics. Landau's most important work was 7 volumes of a course in theoretical physics.

On January 7, 1962, on the road from Moscow to Dubna on Dmitrovskoye Shosse, Landau was in a car accident. As a result of numerous fractures, hemorrhages and head injuries, he was in a coma for 59 days. Physicists around the world were involved in saving Landau's life. A round-the-clock duty was organized at the hospital. Missing medicines were delivered by air from Europe and the USA. As a result of these measures, Landau's life was saved, despite very serious injuries.

After the accident L.D. Landau practically ceased to engage in scientific activities. However, in the opinion of his wife and son, Landau gradually returned to his normal state and in 1968 was close to the resumption of physics. L.D. Landau died on April 1, 1968, a few days after the operation to eliminate bowel obstruction. The diagnosis is thrombosis of mesenteric vessels. Death occurred as a result of blockage of an artery with a detached blood clot. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. Landau's wife in her memoirs expressed doubts about the competence of some of the doctors who treated Landau, especially doctors from special clinics for the leadership of the country.

Landau was rehabilitated only 22 years after his death. On July 23, 1990, the criminal case against him was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti.