Yevgeny Michailowitsch Lifschitz

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Evgeni Michailowitsch Lifschitz ( Russian Евгений Михайлович Лифшиц , English transcription Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz, born February 21, 1915 in Kharkov , Russian Empire ; † October 29, 1985 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist .

life and work

Lifschitz was the son of a Jewish medical professor from Kharkov and studied from 1929 first at a chemistry school, then at the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics at the Mechanical Engineering Institute in Kharkov. In 1933 he made his diploma and then became a student of Lew Landau at the Physikalisch-Technische Institut in Kharkov, where he received his doctorate in 1934 . He then worked there as a research assistant and in 1939 earned his Russian doctorate ( habilitation ) at the University of Saint Petersburg . From 1939 he was at the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He also taught a. a. at Kharkov University, the Kharkov Institute of Chemical Technology and Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Lomonosov University and the Moscow Pedagogical Institute.

Lifschitz is well known in the field of general relativity for his contributions to the BKL singularity ( Belinski - Chalatnikow -Lifschitz singularity ). Up until 2006 this was seen as one of the important open problems of the classical theory of gravity.

After the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted the effect of the force later named after him in 1948, according to which uncharged metal plates arranged extremely close in parallel and between which there is a vacuum, Lifschitz expanded this theory in 1956. Lifschitz predicted that the Casimir force could not only be attractive but also repulsive. He calculated the force that two uncharged objects made of any material exert on each other when there is an electrically polarizable medium in between. Only in 2008 was this assumption confirmed by Federico Capasso and his colleagues at Harvard University .

Together with Lew Landau (and later some other co-authors, the work was not completed until 1979) he wrote the ten-volume “ Textbook of Theoretical Physics ”, which became trend-setting worldwide. He was a student and one of Landau's closest collaborators and belonged to the so-called Moscow School of Theoretical Physics .

Since 1966 he was a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1954 he received the State Prize of the USSR and in 1962 with Landau the Lenin Prize for their course in theoretical physics. In 1974 he received the Landau Prize and in 1958 the Lomonossow Prize . Lifschitz was the long-time editor of the Russian magazine for experimental and theoretical physics (Журнал экспериментальной и теоретической физики, JETP).

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ JN Munday, Federico Capasso, V. Adrian Parsegian: Measured long-range repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz forces . In: Nature . tape 457 , 2008, p. 170–173 , doi : 10.1038 / nature07610 .
personal data
SURNAME Lifschitz, Yevgeny Michailowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Евгений Михайлович Лифшиц (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Kharkov
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1985
Place of death Moscow