Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau described superconductivity through a spatially varying complex order parameter coupled to an electromagnetic vector potential. Their Ginzburg-Landau theory balances the cost of changing the order parameter with magnetic-field energy and the tendency to form a superconducting state. It predicts characteristic coherence and penetration lengths and supports analysis of surfaces, currents and nonuniform states. The theory is phenomenological: it can organize measurable behavior near a transition without first deriving the microscopic pairing interaction.[ref]
A physicist who headed the Lebedev institute’s theoretical physics department from 1971 to 1988.[ref]
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg by Lev P. Pitaevskii. Independent professional identity
Portrait of Vitaly Ginzburg
. Woodruff T. Sullivan III; NRAO/AUI Archives, Sullivan Collection; rights NRAO/AUI/NSF. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source. Articles by others on the same topic
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (1916–2020) was a prominent Russian physicist known for his significant contributions to various fields of theoretical physics, particularly in condensed matter physics and superconductivity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, along with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett, for their pioneering work on the theory of superconductors and superfluids.