Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii

Pitaevskii, Lev Petrovich

 

Born Jan. 18, 1933, in Saratov. Soviet physicist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1976).

Pitaevskii graduated from the University of Saratov in 1955. In 1958 he joined the staff of the Institute of Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1971 he became a professor at the Moscow Physicotechnical Institute.

Pitaevskii’s main works deal with low-temperature physics, plasma physics, quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, and the theory of metals. Pitaevskii developed a theory of superfluidity in the neighborhood of a transition point. He showed that, at sufficiently low temperatures, liquid helium-3 should undergo a transition to the superfluid state.