Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam

For the crater named after him, see Mandel'shtam (crater).

For an unrelated physicist with the same last name, see Stanley Mandelstam.

Leonid Mandelshtam
Leonid Mandelshtam (1879-1944)

Leonid Isaakovich Mandelshtam (Belarusian: Леанід Ісаакавіч Мандэльштам, Russian: Леонид Исаакович Мандельштам, last name more often spelled as Mandelstam) (May 4, 1879 - November 27, 1944) was a Soviet physicist of Belarusian-Jewish background.

Mandelstam was born in Mahilyow, Russian Empire (now Belarus) and died in Moscow, USSR (now Russia). He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1942.

Scientific achievements

Mandelstam founded one of the two major schools of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union (another being due to Lev D. Landau). The main emphasis of his work was broadly considered theory of oscillations, which included optics and quantum mechanics. He was a co-discoverer of inelastic combinatorial scattering of light used now in Raman spectroscopy. This paradigm-altering discovery (together with G. S. Landsberg) had occurred at the Moscow State University just one week earlier than a parallel discovery of the same phenomena by C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan. In Russian literature it is called "combinatorial scattering of light" (from combination of frequencies of photons and molecular vibrations) but in English it is named after Raman. Mandelstam was mentor in science and life to Igor Y. Tamm, one of the Nobel Prize Laureates in Physics.

Discovery of the combinatorial scattering of light

In 1918, Mandelstam theoretically predicted the fine structure splitting in Rayleigh scattering due to light scattering on thermal acoustic waves. Beginning from 1926, L.I. Mandelstam and G.S. Landsberg initiated experimental studies on vibrational scattering of light in crystals at the Moscow State University. As a result of this research, Landsberg and Mandelstam discovered the effect of the combinatorial scattering of light on 21 February 1928. They presented this fundamental discovery for the first time at a colloquium on 27 April 1928. They published brief reports about this discovery (experimental results with theoretical explanation) in Russian^[1] and in German^[2] and then published a comprehensive paper in Zeitschrift fur Physik.^[3]

In the same year of 1928, two Indian scientists C.V. Raman and K.S. Krishnan were looking for "Compton component" of scattered light in liquids and vapors. They found the same combinatorial scattering of light. Raman stated that "The line spectrum of the new radiation was first seen on 28 February 1928."^[4] Thus, combinatorial scattering of light was discovered by Mandelstam and Landsberg a week earlier than by Raman and Krishnan. However, the phenomenon became known as Raman effect.

Journal articles

• L. I. Mandelshtam, I. E. Tamm "The uncertainty relation between energy and time in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics", Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR (ser. fiz.) 9, 122-128 (1945). English translation: J. Phys. (USSR) 9, 249-254 (1945).

Notes

1. ^ G.S. Landsherg, L.I. Mandelstam, "New phenomenon in scattering of light (preliminary report)", Journal of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society, Physics Section 60, 335 (1928).
2. ^ G. Landsberg, L.Mandelstam, "Eine neue Erscheinung bei der Lichtzertreuung", Naturwissenschaften 16, 557 (1928).
3. ^ G.S. Landsherg, L.I. Mandelstam, "Uber die Lichtzerstrenung in Kristallen", Zeitschrift fur Physik 50, 769 (1928).
4. ^ Raman C.V., "A new radiation", Ind. J. Phys. 1928. V. 2. P. 387.

References

• Feînberg, E.L. The forefather, Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, Vol. 172, 2002 (Physics-Uspekhi, 45, 81 (2002) doi:10.1070/PU2002v045n01ABEH001126)

External links

• Y.L. Alpert, Tribute to the Scientific School of L.I. Mandelshtam
• Sergei I. Vavilov, Obituary to academician L.I. Mandelstam, 1945

Persondata
Name	Mandelshtam, Leonid Isaakovich
Alternative names
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Date of birth	May 4, 1879
Place of birth
Date of death	November 27, 1944
Place of death