In May 2026 a Lecture Hall of the University of Trento has been named under Lev Pitaevskii.
Sandro Stringari (
Presentation
), Mikhail Lieberman, Marina Sakharov-Liberman (
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) and Francesca Ferlaino have been special guests for the celabration.
Contributions and greetings came also from Eric Cornell, Rudi Grimm, the University of Trento Rector and the Chief of the Physics Department.
(Copyright to Marina Sakharov, Tiziana Strigari and Federico Nardelli)
Eric Cornell: Lev Pitaevskii was a theoretical physicist with a towering international reputation. For years, he worked in Russia and Israel, but surely there was always something within his soul that yearned for Italy, because when he moved to Trento thirty years ago, his productivity and influence in the field redoubled!
While his name will forever be attached to his early quantum fluids work, for instance inventing the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, his work with his Trento colleagues, and with collaborators around the world, was extremely important to the development of the field of ultracold gases, and to other areas in quantum mechanics and fluids.
For my part, the honor of being able to co-author a paper with him, in 2007, is one of the highlights of my scientific career. The paper in question was on the temperature dependence of the Casimir-Polder force. Lev pointed out to us that the surprising effects of thermal nonequilibrium could greatly enhance the force between an atom and a dielectric surface, and we were thrilled to be able to confirm his prediction. Beyond that particular collaboration, I have fond memories of many instructive conversations with Lev, which have greatly influenced my choice of research directions.
It’s difficult to count all the major contributions of Lev, but I mention: His early work on quantum vortices (which was the original motivation for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation). His work elucidating Casimir, van der Waals and related forces. His extensive body of work on coherent excitations (including nonlinear and dissipative effects) in Bose-Einstein condensates. His work on critical phenomena in BEC, including truly quantitative predictions on how T_c depends on interactions and finite size.
Also, beyond his individual research contributions, there are his comprehensive and scholarly reviews of entire fields of physics. Most professors I know in this field have a copy of his books and review articles always convenient on their shelf, or perhaps directly on their desk!
While Lev Pitaeskii dramatically influenced the course of multiple subdisciplines of physics, he was all the same a gentle soul, friendly and well-liked by all who knew him. Lev is dearly missed by his friends, and he had many!
The naming of this lecture hall in his memory is a very fitting tribute to a man whose lectures taught us all so very much.
Rudi Grimm
One of the greatest experiences of my scientific life was our collaboration on second sound and the superfluid phase transition. Having Lev on the team guided us - the experimentalists from Innsbruck - not only with crucial physical insights, but it also provided a profound source of personal inspiration. Lev represented a direct link to the historic foundations of our field and to the groundbreaking work of Landau’s group on the theory of superfluidity. Our joint work remains a wonderful example of a true synergy between theory and experiment, and a definitive highlight of my career. It was a great honor to be a part of it.
