Sykes / Ter Haar / Pitaevskii Perspectives in Theoretical Physics

The Collected Papers of E\M\Lifshitz
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-08-098471-1
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 761 Seiten

Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz is perhaps best known for his long association with his mentor Lev D Landau, with whom he co-wrote the classic Course of Theoretical Physics, but he was a noted and respected Soviet physicist in his own right. Born in the Ukraine to a scientific family, his long and distinguished career will be remembered for three things - his collaboration with Landau on the internationally acclaimed Course of Theoretical Physics, his work as editor of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and his scientific papers. As well as his work with Landau, E\M\Lifshitz collaborated with many noted Soviet scientists such as I\M\Khalatnikov, I\E\Dyzaloshinskii, V\V\Sudakov, V\A\Belinskii and the editor of this book, L\P\Pitaevskii. Many of the papers presented in this book include their contribution. Collected together they give a comprehensive and penetrating insight into the man and his work, clearly showing Lifshitz's contribution to physics and the influences on his work.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sykes, J. B.

Ter Haar, D.

Pitaevskii, L. P.

Leseproben

Introduction

D. TER HAAR

Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz was born on 21 February 1915 in Kharkov, which at that time was the capital of the Ukraine. His father was a gastroenterologist and a professor at the Institute of Medicine. His younger brother was Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz, the theoretical solid state physicist–like his brother an Academician and a Lenin Prize winner. E. M. Lifshitz studied at the Chemical College in Kharkov from 1929 to 1931 and after that from 1931 to 1933 in the Physics and Mechanics Faculty of the Kharkov Mechanics and Machine Building Institute. From 1933 to 1938 he worked, first as a graduate student under L. D. Landau until his Ph.D. examination in 1934, and then as a senior research assistant in the Ukrainian Physicotechnical Institute. From February to May 1938 he worked in Moscow at the All-Union Leather Institute, returning to Kharkov to the Chemical Technology Institute, where he stayed from September 1938 to June 1939. This period of rapid changes of places of work coincided with Landau’s move from Kharkov to Moscow, Landau’s unjust arrest, and his fortunate release-due to Kapitza’s intervention with the authorities-a year later. These difficulties also explain the gap of three months when Lifshitz lived in the Crimea with his first wife, Elena Konstantinovna Berezovskaya.

In 1939 Lifshitz’s D. Sc. thesis was accepted by the Leningrad State University and apart from a period during the war, when the whole Institute of Physical Problems was evacuated to Kazan, he spent the rest of his life from September 1939 in Moscow at the Institute of Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Until 1956, when he switched all his activities to his work on the () and the , he taught at several institutes: Kharkov University, Kharkov Mechanics and Machine Building Institute, Kharkov Chemical Technology Institute, Moscow State University, and the Moscow Pedagogical Institute.

Lifshitz received many honours. In 1945 he received the Order of the Red Star for his work for the army, and in 1954 the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and also a State Prize; in 1958 the Lomonosov Prize of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1962, jointly with Landau, the Lenin Prize. In 1966 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he was awarded the Landau Prize of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1974 and elected an Academician in 1979; in 1983 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and in 1985 he received an honorary doctorate from Budapest University.

Lifshitz had a son from his first marriage who is a pathological anatomist, and Lifshitz is survived by his second wife, Zinaida Ivanovna. He died on 29 October 1985 after a heart operation.

When one comes to Lifshitz’s scientific career, one must distinguish three important parts: his work - originally with Landau-on the classical , his work as editor of , and his scientific papers. is for Soviet physics what the is for the USA - the main physics journal. Lifshitz for about 30 years dealt with all aspects of all the papers submitted to , and its excellence as a primary physics journal is largely due to Lifshitz’s work.

Lifshitz will probably be mostly remembered for having been the second part of ‘Landau and Lifshitz’, the masterly 10-volume textbook of theoretical physics. A large part of Lifshitz’s scientific output can be found in the After Landau’s accident in January 1962, from which he did not recover, Lifshitz alone was responsible not only for preparing new editions of the volumes which had already appeared, but also for writing-with new collaborators, all from the Landau school-the volumes which were still needed to complete the set. Many of Lifshitz’s papers provided sections for the various volumes of the

Many generations of physicists-not only in the USSR-have used ‘Landau and Lifshitz’ in their daily (creative and educational) activity. The complete course, which was completed in 1979, consists of 10 volumes: ( and ), , and The idea for this course was conceived in the early 1930s when Landau was in Kharkov, and the early chapters were based on lecture notes.

The guiding idea of the course consists of arriving by the shortest path to the solution of specific problems without getting bogged down in arguments and the laying of foundations. It is, however, not just a handbook of mathematical methods. The whole exposition is based on physical concepts, either general ones–such as conservation laws–or model ones-such as a collisionless plasma or a perfect gas.

The course has been internationally acclaimed: it has been translated in its entirety into English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, and Hungarian, while parts have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Rumanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Hindi, and Slovak.

In the light of Lifshitz’s activities for and the it is not surprising that a feature of Lifshitz’s work as a scientist is the relatively small number of papers he published. The present volume contains only 48 items, and of those six are review articles.17,27,31,32,34,41†

Most of Lifshitz’s papers deal with specific problems in theoretical physics rather than with general theories. This is a consequence of the fact that in working on the he came upon as yet unsolved points which he felt should be incorporated in the volume he was working on. This has as a consequence that most papers are quite extensive, and one finds only two short notes among the papers. The first one is a brief paper21 showing that the chemical potential of liquid 3He can, over a fairly wide temperature range, be represented as a power series in 2; this paper was a precursor of the Fermi liquid theory devised by Landau several years later. We quote an interesting-prophetic-sentence from this paper: ‘Theoretically, liquid helium-3 should have a specific heat proportional to the temperature as it is probably a quantum liquid with a “Fermi-type” energy spectrum like that of the “electron liquid” in a metal.’ The second brief note39 reports briefly more extensive work given in detail in several other papers.

Of the review papers, three17,27,32 deal with the behaviour of liquid helium at low temperatures, and especially with its superfluid properties. Two31,34 deal with forces between condensed bodies, a topic on which he published extensively (see below), while the last review paper41 dealt with cosmological problems to which he devoted so much time towards the end of his life.

A number of his earlier papers were written with Landau. His first paper1 dealt with pair production during a collision of two particles, a topic he returned to in his second paper2 which he wrote by himself. In these papers, which appeared only a few years after the discovery of the positron, he discussed electron-positron pair formation in heavy-particle collisions. In the first paper Landau and he study the ultra-relativistic limit, that is, the case where the relative velocity of the two colliding bodies is close to the velocity of light. In this case one must use second-order perturbation theory, as first-order perturbation theory gives an effect which in the ultra-relativistic limit is much smaller than the second-order effect. We can then neglect the difference between the particle trajectories and straight lines; that is, neglect the interactions between the two colliding particles, and the effect is due merely to the superposed fields of these particles. In this case the pair-production cross-section varies as the cube of the logarithm of the energy of the colliding particles. In the follow-up of this paper Lifshitz considered the case where the relative velocity of the two colliding particles is small as compared to the velocity of light. In this case one must distinguish several regions. The first region is the one where the velocity is so small that the inverse time of collision is much less than 2/ where is the electron mass and the speed of light; in that case the pair-production cross-section is small and decreases exponentially with decreasing velocity. That region is therefore of no further interest. For larger velocities one should distinguish the case where the motion of the colliding particles can be treated classically and the case where we need quantum theory to describe it. It turns out, however, that the pair-production cross-section is the same in these two cases. For these cases Lifshitz first of all repeated the calculations from the earlier paper; that is, he calculated the second-order cross-section, in order to be able to compare it with the first-order effect, where the wavefunctions of the colliding particles are perturbed by their interaction. The results of the calculations of both the...