Irvine, California, 14-15 December 2001
 Igor
Dzyaloshinskii has been a professor of physics at the University
of California - Irvine since 1992. A student of Lev Landau, Dzyaloshinskii
began his career at Kapitza's Institute of Physical Problems,
and subsequently became a founding member of the Landau Institute
for Theoretical Physics, where he worked for more than two decades
before moving to the United States. He has published papers on
a wide variety of subjects in condensed matter theory. With A.
A. Abrikosov and L. P. Gor'kov, he is author of the seminal textbook Methods
of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics (English edition,
1963).
Interview recorded and transcribed by PoS contributor Karl Hall.
IED
Could you tell me, just what are you interested in?
PoS
We are interested in your understanding of the interactions of quantum field
theory with solid state physics beginning in the 1950s. We want to learn
about your interpretation of the broad sweep of those interactions at the
technical level, but at the same time we're also interested in hearing about
your own training as a theorist, both beginning at the university and then
as a student of Lev Landau, and your early collaborations with fellow theorists
at the Institute of Physical Problems, and so forth. If it's all right with
you, it would actually be nice to just have a few details about your early
life and education, your family background, perhaps.
IED
Well, that will take a long time...
PoS
You were born in 1931, is that correct?
IED
Well, I would say that, unlike my colleagues you have already seen, I in fact
came into science from the very bottom of society. My parents, my father...
PoS
Were your parents scientists as well?
IED
Oh, no, they were just simple people. Actually I was the first college-educated
person in the whole family. And I even actually am not aware of my father's
education at all, because you know, he was born, technically, in Russia, but
it was in the nineteenth century, in Silesia, he was a Polish Jew. I am a
mixture of Polish Jew and Russian.
PoS
But you yourself were born and raised in Moscow?
IED
Yes. In fact the real vernacular of my father was German, because he was born
in Silesia, close to the border with Germany, and at that time in Jewish
society, as far as I know, the vernacular was German (well, besides Yiddish).
PoS
But in your own family you did not speak Yiddish.
IED
No, but I learned German from my father. So in fact that was enough for me
to pass all possible exams in high school and the university and that sort
of thing. That's why I never studied English. But otherwise they were simple
people. I do not know much about my relatives from the maternal side, because
all of them left there, and so I never saw them. And on the paternal side
my great grandparents were serfs. My great grandfather, he became a rich
person. But being a typical peasant male of the time, he gave an education only to boys, and my line,
the female line from my grandmother, they didn't get beyond a parochial school,
and the same thing with my grandfather. He was a peasant boy from the same
village.
PoS
How did they make their way to Moscow?
IED
Well, at that time, you know, in Russia -- that means the last quarter of the
nineteenth century -- the land was still caste [i.e., people were classified
according to "estate" (soslovie)].
PoS
But wasn't it difficult to obtain permits to live in Moscow?
IED
Oh, no, it was in Imperial times...
PoS
IED
At the end of the nineteenth century, you do not need to have a permit to live
there. You go to find a job. My grandfather, he became a metal fitter, and
then he rose to foreman. In fact it was a streetcar depot. So actually I
am the first, and it's funny, and the last in my family with college education.
My cousins, they all graduated...[from vocational schools].
PoS
In middle school and high school, did you have teachers who
encouraged you and said, "You should continue taking more calculus," or something
like that?
IED
No, not teachers, certainly, but somehow I decided that I... Well, I knew fundamentals
of calculus.
PoS
Before you went to university...
IED
In high school. I studied the book that was available, a calculus textbook
for engineers. I tried to read more mathematically-oriented books, but it
was hard. At that time epsilons and deltas were fancied, as you may already
know, and that was hard for me.
PoS
IED
Yes. These days it's impossible, now I cannot read modern mathematics, because
they use the silly Bourbaki language. It's impossible to understand. These
people, as far as I know, they have contaminated the training
of American mathematicians. In fact I have heard about a special Harvard
language now, and it's hard to read.
PoS
Now, may I ask... {A minute or so lost to recording error. The topic was
IED's student days at Moscow State University. The gist of the remarks was
that the quality of lecturing was not terribly high. IED did not attend many
lectures, and studied largely on his own. He passed Lev Landau's Theoretical
Minimum in 1952 or 1953. When the recording resumes, the topic of discussion
is the dean of the physics faculty, A. Sokolov, and then commentary on other MSU
physicists IED did not hold in high esteem.}
IED
...or they were absolute fools like Iakov Petrovich Terletskii [author of Paradoxes
in the Theory of Relativity, and Statistical Mechanics].
PoS
Yes, Terletskii is an interesting case. I mean, did you have any dealings with
him, or...?
IED
Yes, I did, well, I was supposed to attend his lecture course. He was famous
-- there was a joke -- he could not memorize even a single line. What he
was doing -- his style was this [gestures to palm]: he looks at his papers...
PoS
...to check the notes in his hands...
IED
Yes, like this. But the boards were all like this, so everybody knew. So it
was a standing joke about him. I am not aware of a single result obtained
by him.
PoS
Now, right in the period when you had completed your studies, you had gotten
your diploma, and you continued your graduate studies at the Institute of
Physical Problems, the curriculum at Moscow State University began to be
influenced by the Academy of Sciences.
IED
Yes, but that's already after I left the university. I would say it happened
around 1956. It was three years after I left, as a result of Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov, who
was extremely influential with the higher-ups. He did it. But before that,
it was... Well, they still gave a solid education, but... The physics was
good.
PoS
So you never had to pass any exam on dialectical materialism, or...?
IED
Oh, yeah, sure, I passed early. Yes, certainly passed.
PoS
IED
Well, but it was so easy.
PoS
A kind of ritual, but that's all...
IED
Passing was not a problem. First of all, I had two years of something like "History
of the Party," or "Marxism-Leninism," then it was "Political Economy," then
it was "Philosophy." And then I passed everything again to qualify for graduation.
PoS
But that was a mere distraction along the way...
IED
Yes, but that was not hard, it was easy. No, the lecturers there, they were
simple people.
PoS
But was it a kind of social ritual you simply took for granted?
IED
No, no, I enjoyed part of it. I've read Das Kapital.Well, not all three
volumes, but the first and part of the second. That's not bad.
PoS
Was it ever the case that people recognized
you as being clearly a superior student, and thought, well, you might be
a good candidate for the Komsomol [Young Communist League], or that...?
IED
Oh, no, I did not take part. I was a member of this Komsomol certainly; it
was hard not to be. But I did not take part in activities.
PoS
"Obshchestvennaia rabota" ["social" or "public work"] and so forth?
IED
No, I always escaped it somehow. I realized, you know, there was a simple trick.
If you were asked to do something, then the best way I found was, you do
not argue with them, you simply say, "Yes, of course I will," and then you
do not do it, and that was OK. But if you start to argue, then you will be
reprimanded. It was OK. It's like everything in Russia, you do not argue.
You simply... it's much easier not to do anything than to argue. Arguments
were offensive, and eventually they might become "anti-party" or whatever.
But not doing anything was OK, was not "anti-party."
PoS
So tell me a little bit about this period. You've already passed the Landau
Theoretical Minimum, around 1952-1953...
IED
The first of the exams was in 1951. I finished everything in the fall of 1952,
I believe.
PoS
Right, and it's not until 1957 that you formally received your kandidatskaia [Ph.D.]?
IED
PoS
You don't encounter any problems defending your kandidatskaia?
IED
No, but the point is that this is where my Jewishness enters in, and in Russia
I was a Jew by definition.
PoS
IED
No. I was Russian, but moreover I'm a baptized Russian Orthodox, because the
first thing my grandmother did was baptize me. My maternal part of my family,
they were quite anti-Semitic, so when my mother married a Jew, it was quite,
I do not know exactly, but the first thing my grandmother did, she baptized
me. I am the worst combination, in fact. I was Jewish in Russia, and now
I am Russian, say, in Israel. I realized when I was there, I am Russian there,
not Jewish.
PoS
Your father was not observant?
IED
No. Well, at that time nobody was. In fact, to be honest, I know a great number
of Jews, purely ethnic Jews, but I never met a single observant Jew in my
life.
PoS
Could you expand a little bit more, it sounds like this period between 1953
and 1957 was rather unstructured. That is, you would go to seminars and colloquia,
but...
IED
Well, no, because of my Jewishness, let's say. You know, after you graduate
in Russia, well, specifically at that time, you were assigned a work place.
In Russia it was mandatory. The rationale behind
it was that education was free, but that means one has to work for society
to repay its investment in one's education.
PoS
And your assignment was where?
IED
My assignment was, I work for two years in a construction engineering enterprise,
like a materials scientist. The main thing was, you see, at that time, in
1953, to be precise, Landau was still engaged in defense work, actually he
would have been involved in the H-bomb. I arrived at the Institute of Physical
Problems in the fall of 1954. There was still some work in this defense work.
Because of this I needed a clearance even to enter the institute. They would
not admit a person without clearance inside. So in fact, it's funny, it's
a miracle to me, too, but two years previously I had applied for clearance
immediately after I graduated (and before accepting an assignment in the
construction industry), but it arrived in two years' time. For two years
I worked. In fact at that time I was almost sure that I would never get the
clearance.
PoS
So during that entire time you were not able to go to a physics colloquium
anywhere in Moscow?
IED
No, basically it was possible to go to the university, but not to any institute
like FIAN [Lebedev Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences], for instance,
or the Kapitza Institute [Institute of Physical Problems], where Landau worked;
they were closed. And then like a bolt from the sky, a clearance appeared,
and then I became Landau's student in the fall of 1954. So I worked a year
and a half in industry. Well, it was not bad. I'm rather like any Russian
-- I'm absolutely adaptable. I could easily imagine that I would live my
life's possibilities... I simply could not imagine it was possible. I just
applied for the clearance because Landau insisted that I should.
PoS
So Landau manages to get you registered as an aspirant [graduate student] at
the Institute of Physical Problems?
IED
Yes, so then I enter it, and then basically...
PoS
What is the nature of your training at that stage?
IED
Nothing. Landau, he even... At that time, my idea was that I'd like to do particle
physics, field theory. I did not know too much about this area, but I had
read Richard Feynman's papers.
PoS
That's what I wanted to ask you, how did you first become acquainted with Feynman
diagrams?
IED
By reading his article of 1948, or it was the article of 1950.
PoS
The Physical Review articles?
IED
PoS
I mean, I think a Russian translation was available in...
IED
No, and basically there was a good review in Russian written by [Vladimir Borisovich]
Berestetskii. {See V. B. Berestetskii, "Teoriia vozmushchenii v kvantovoi
elektrodinamike" (Perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics), Uspekhi
fizicheskikh nauk 46 (1952): 231-278.}
PoS
Berestetskii was the one that was crucial for you?
IED
PoS
That was on perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics, that was Uspekhi
fizicheskikh nauk from 1952.
IED
I knew this already before graduation, and in fact my diplomate thesis was
-- I used in the simplest possible way Feynman diagrams to calculate the
decay of V-particles -- at that time they were not called lambda, they were
called V-particles. So I did this, easily. So that was my thesis. Then when
I got this clearance and came to Landau, my idea was that I will continue
in this way. But Landau...
PoS
IED
No, he was much more nasty to me. Well, first of all, I do not know how it
sounds now, because he made an outrageously -- now you would call it outrageous
-- he behaved like a male chauvinist pig, he made a sexist remark, of the
sort that 'only women usually run after fashions.' The real men, they are
doing what can be done, what has to be done. And then he said, "When you
have your own ideas, come to me and I will discuss with you these ideas,
but until then, I won't listen to field theory." And in fact that was the
end of it.
PoS
Yet along the way, you did master the techniques of field theory.
IED
PoS
What kinds of things were you studying in doing so?
IED
Well, I told you that I studied Berestetskii, and in parallel I read some Feynman
articles.
PoS
And you also studied the textbook of Alexander Il'ich Akhiezer and Berestetskii [Quantum
Electrodynamics (1953)]?
IED
No, no, at that time it was not written yet.
PoS
I thought that was the mid-fifties that it appeared.
IED
Yeah. I believe it was 1956 or 1957 or something like that, and so I did not
read all of the book ever. It was a really good book, but my real teacher
in this way was Berestetskii himself. I read his really good review in Uspekhi
fizicheskikh nauk.
PoS
IED
Yes, and then in the funniest way, Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz, at that time
he did the work in 1955 on the theory of Casimir and Van der Waals forces.
So he did it using the theory of thermodynamic fluctuations.
PoS
So he's the one who got you started on what eventually became your first published
paper?
IED
Yes, well, it was not the first.
PoS
Well, you had an "Account of retardation in the interaction of neutral atoms" [Soviet
Physics JETP 3 (1957): 977]. You submitted several at once.
IED
Again, there was a backlog of works. Basically, Lifshitz either could not finish
it, or he did not know how to do it. He asked me, and it did not take a long
time. So I did some technical work on superconductivity. It was rather mathematical
work which I easily did ["On the stability of the phase boundaries between
normal and superconducting states," Soviet Physics JETP 3 (1957):
980]. I think it was justifiably forgotten.
PoS
That was sort of an exercise proving that you could do the calculations.
IED
Yes, sort of. But then he asked me, you know Hendrik Casimir himself, he derived the
force between two atoms at large distances using non-relativistic methods,
and so actually it was not clear how he did cutoffs and that sort of stuff,
because his calculations diverged. So what I did, what I consider my first
real work, I derived Casimir's formula using Feynman stuff. And it was absolutely
easy seeing directly that divergences were only in the self-masses... So I did this, and after
this I switched to magnetism.
PoS
So it was in discussions with Lifshitz that you got interested in antiferromagnetism?
IED
Oh, no, Lifshitz never took that up. The topic somehow arose. Basically with
Landau you were supposed to come up with your own idea, what you want to
do. He was, I believe, like Arnold Sommerfeld, or something.
PoS
I was very struck by the phrase that you used in your essay from the Recollections volume
["Landau glazami uchenika" (Landau through a student's eyes) in Vospominaniia
o L. D. Landau, ed. I. M. Khalatnikov (1988); volume available in English
as Landau the Physicist and the Man (1989)]. You nicely summarized the
challenge of self-presentation for the young theorist trying to prove himself
to Landau. You said, "For the graduate student and aspiring theorist, the rigorousness
of Landau's pedagogy consisted in the fact that the poor fellow had to act
like he had never received instruction from anyone."
IED
PoS
I mean, that says a lot right there.
IED
Yes, and the point is, we learned how to understand, basically without benefit
of explanation.
PoS
Yes, but without guidance? That's a severe standard!
IED
That was the hardest part of Landau's school. You attended the seminar, and
fundamentally he would not give the reporter [on the day's topic] the opportunity
to explain, because he was absolutely selfish. He used seminars for his own
edification. He did not read anything, he only listened, and as soon as he
understood, then everything stopped.
PoS
Do you happen to recall when you were first, what would we call it, "responsible
reporter" at the Landau seminar?
IED
Oh, no, you see, at that time, well, I'm a stutterer now, but the older I become,
the easier it is to control my stutter. At that time I could not speak at
all [in front of the seminar]. I even could not defend my own Ph.D. thesis
[orally]; I was not able to speak. At some point I found myself able to give
lectures, and when I am speaking in front of an audience, I never stutter,
because I know what to do, and I am in control. But at that time I could
not. I was listening only. Or listening to discussions, because there was
discussion. It was really the best possible school, but it was a hard school.
PoS
This is at a time when you are still a graduate student, and you've actually
just registered at the Institute of Physical Problems. Landau, Abrikosov,
and Khalatnikov begin publishing these papers on Green's functions and field
theory. What was your sense of the significance of those papers
at the time? How did you understand them?
IED
I was terribly interested. At that time we were looking around at what's going
on, what everybody was doing, and we discussed everything. It was exceptional.
I suspect it was just the same thing as in the Bohr Institute. So the main
thing was discussion, but not discussion at seminar time, like with Niels Bohr,
but rather... So we discussed a lot among ourselves. You could not discuss
with Landau, he would just give a short explanation, and that was it. Like
Wolfgang Pauli. Once he said, "The only person in the world of whom I was afraid was
Pauli." Because Pauli is known to have said once to Landau, "You should be
ashamed, you should think for yourself," when Landau asked him why something
was so.
PoS
"You yourself can generate the proper and correct answer."
IED
PoS
Now, of course Landau is famous for having been very skeptical about Hamiltonian
formulations of quantum field theory in this period.
IED
No, but at that time he became convinced (it was about 1955,
1956) that this theory does not work, in the sense that it simply
does not exist, because renormalized charges are zero, and that
was the theory.
PoS
So what did your circle think about S-matrix theory? Did you do work with that?
Did you feel like that was a useful technique perhaps? Or did that seem "without
prospects"?
IED
No, but at the time who was able to do anything with it? There was simply not
a single result besides all these infinite series of [Arthur] Wightman's articles
on axiomatics, and that sort of thing.
PoS
But I mean, for instance, the work of Geoffrey Chew and Stanley Mandelstam.
IED
Yes, that was when Landau first got excited, that was basically with Mandelstam's
work. And then there was the second work -- complex angular momenta (there
was a second part), which eventually -- they were developed by Feynman: partons,
and that sort of thing. But that was already after Landau's accident. But
then we started to apply, we understood that in condensed matter theory everything
is finite anywhere, so... But still we were educated in diagram summation
and fundamentally we certainly knew Gell-Mann-Low renormalization, and we
understand that the theory is renormalizable only when divergences are logarithmic.
If you look at what we did, all our lives we were summing logarithms. Until
my most recent work I never used the renormalization group (RG). I always
wrote the same RG for slightly different charges, actually for [voltages?]
and not for charges. That was what we were doing, and then we sum up in higher
orders of bare charge times logarithm. Of course it was a first approximation
to RG.
PoS
Before we move to issues in condensed matter physics, do you have any recollection
of the international conference on high-energy physics in Moscow in 1956?
IED
Sure, I was young at the time, and I certainly did not talk to anybody, but
I remember I saw [Freeman] Dyson. Dyson for us was the most exciting personage. I remember
he came to Moscow directly from Finland, and there he somehow damaged his
nose bathing in a pool, and he wore a bandage on his nose.
PoS
A very distinctive demeanor at a conference, I'm sure.
IED
So he was the most interesting person for me and for us, even though there
were some older people there. But we were young and excited. "Summation" was
our motto. We summed diagrams, we did not write RGs. And I never did. I always
sum, and then you call it RG if you like. Because we were always summing
logarithms -- it was RG anyway. So that's OK.
PoS
So at this stage you didn't pay much attention to, say, the 1955 articles of
N. N. Bogoliubov and D. S. Shirkov.
IED
PoS
Had you studied them carefully?
IED
Well, but I did not see anything specific. You write Lie group equations, OK,
but... I understand that maybe for some particle physicists it was more exciting,
but for us -- I certainly read it -- but it was never a working tool. RG
became a working tool when it indicated it could not be derived from any
field theory.
PoS
Could you expand on that?
IED
Well, I mean in statistics or whatever, like [Kenneth G.] Wilson started to do. But actually
if you read his paper, the last one was, he derived equations for exponents
using Feynman diagrams and stuff. He used the fact that [for] d=4 you have
mean field theory, and then he interpolated. But it was OK if you do not
go too far off. The main troubles are first, your fixed points could become
unstable, and second, a new one could arrive from infinity of some step.
But if you keep to this point, it's OK. His formula for exponents are good.
And then this math was extended to the utmost, I believe, by Zinn-Justin,
this thick book. It's impossible to read.
PoS
It's a compendium, an encyclopedia.
IED
Yes. The main thing is, as soon as you know that there are exponents, who cares
about what they are? That's what Wilson did. And he showed an outrageously
simple way to calculate the first term in d-4, but the rest is... [dismissive
gesture]. Obviously there are some exponents. It is still hard to measure
them, because the closer you are to the transition, the more the uncertainties
grow experimentally. I was never excited with calculations of exponents.
In fact, what I did, my only real work in phase transitions, was when I found
cases when there is not a single stable fixed point.
PoS
Are you referring to your work with A. I. Larkin?
IED
No. That's my only work on phase transitions, actually I would
say. No, I did this, but that's OK. Actually there are two cases
where fluctuations make the transitions first-order. There's
liquid-solid, where fluctuations are, well, it's like field
theory with an infinite number of components. And this one,
the system has complicated enough long-range order. All of them,
I was not able to prove all of them unstable. But I made a conjecture,
and the late Louis Michel (Institute des Hautes Etudes)... He
died, I think, last year. In fact, he started as a physicist,
but then he turned more toward mathematics under the influence
of the place where he worked. This institute is an analogue
of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In fact it
was modeled on that. And more and more it was heavily mathematized.
But he proved the conjecture, in fact. My guess was that it
is a topological fact, and indeed it was. So you look the complicated
topology -- I wasn't able to, he did it, and he found a flaw:
it's always unstable in this many-dimensional space. Well, you
know already from the paper of [Lev Petrovich] Gor'kov, we started to apply
this summation concept to 1-D, and then we did it with Larkin,
and with Gor'kov again.
{The papers referred to by Dzyaloshinskii are:
S. A. Brazovskii, I. E. Dzyaloshinskii, and B. G. Kukharenko, "First-order
magnetic phase transitions and fluctuations," Sov. Phys. JETP
43 (1976): 1178-1183.
I. E. Dzyaloshinskii, "Character of phase transitions to
a helical or sinusoidal state in magnetic materials," Sov.
Phys. JETP 45 (1977): 1014-1022.
S. A. Brazovskii, I. E. Dzyaloshinskii, and A. R. Muratov, "Theory
of weak crystallization," Sov. Phys. JETP 66 (1987): 625-633.
I. E. Dzyaloshinskii and A. I. Larkin, "Possible state of
quasi-unidimensional systems," Sov. Phys. JETP 34 (1972):
422-427.
L. P. Gor'kov and I. E. Dzyaloshinskii, "Possible phase
transitions in systems of interacting metallic filaments (quasiunidimensional
metals)," Sov. Phys. JETP 40 (1975): 198-207.}
Continue reading part II of
this interview.
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