Lev Davidovich Landau
1908–1968, Baku, Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan), Moscow, Soviet Union
Soviet theoretical physicist who created the theory of superfluidity in liquid helium and founded a school that shaped 20th-century condensed matter physics.
A child prodigy in mathematics, Landau published his first papers as a teenager and introduced the density matrix and the theory of second-order phase transitions before turning thirty. After surviving imprisonment under Stalin, he built in Moscow a legendary theoretical school whose demanding 'theoretical minimum' examination trained generations of physicists; the ten-volume Course of Theoretical Physics co-written with Lifshitz remains a standard reference.
Nobel-winning work
The 1962 Nobel Prize honored Landau's pioneering theories of condensed matter, above all his explanation of the superfluidity of liquid helium-4 observed by Pyotr Kapitsa in 1938. His 1941 two-fluid model treated helium II as a mixture of a normal and a superfluid component, and his theory of quantized excitations — phonons and rotons — correctly predicted that the liquid can flow without viscosity below the so-called Landau critical velocity.
The same framework, extended to fermions, became the Landau Fermi-liquid theory, the standard description of electrons in metals, and his mean-field theory of phase transitions remains central to modern condensed matter physics.
Workplaces: Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow
Russia