Grigory Landsberg - Discovery of The Combinatorial Scattering of Light

Discovery of The Combinatorial Scattering of Light

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. Their intention was to prove the theoretical prediction made by Mandelstam in 1918 regarding the fine structure splitting in Rayleigh scattering due to light scattering on thermal acoustic waves. As a result of this research, Landsberg and Mandelstam discovered the effect of the inelastic combinatorial scattering of light on 21 February 1928 ("combinatorial" – from combination of frequencies of photons and molecular vibrations). 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 and in German and then published a comprehensive paper in Zeitschrift fur Physik.

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." 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 because Raman published his results earlier than Landsherg and Mandelstam did. Nonetheless, in the Russian-language literature it is traditionally called "combinatorial scattering of light".

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