Lev Davidovich Landau (1908–1968) was a Soviet theoretical physicist and one of the towering figures of 20th-century physics. He worked across an extraordinary range of fields — quantum mechanics, condensed matter, magnetism, superconductivity — and won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of superfluidity in liquid helium.
For the Aurora story, the relevant piece is Landau damping, which he worked out in 1946. He showed that a wave moving through a plasma can exchange energy directly with individual charged particles — without any collisions — when those particles travel at nearly the same speed as the wave. Particles slightly slower than the wave effectively “surf” along its electric field and get accelerated.
Decades later this turned out to be exactly the mechanism behind the brightest auroras: electrons surf on the electric field of the Alfvén waves that snap back from Earth’s magnetotail and are flung toward the upper atmosphere — see Aurora. Landau reasoned all of this out long before there was any way to measure it directly; the definitive experimental confirmation only came in 2021.
We came across his name during the aurora lecture at Halley Observatory, see 2026-06-28 Lezing over het Poollicht bij Halley.