Physicist — Louis-Victor de Broglie (Dieppe, 1892 – Louveciennes, 1987) was a French physicist, from an old aristocratic family, who initially trained in history before turning to physics. In his 1924 doctoral thesis he put forward the revolutionary idea that not only light, but every particle of matter possesses a wave nature, associating a wavelength with every moving body. This apparently bold hypothesis was soon confirmed experimentally by electron diffraction (Davisson and Germer, 1927) and became one of the pillars of quantum mechanics, inspiring Schrödinger’s wave equation. For this discovery he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929. The wave-particle duality he introduced is today a fundamental concept of modern physics.
Trivia
De Broglie’s thesis was so surprising that his examiners, uncertain, sent it to Einstein for an opinion; Einstein replied enthusiastically, calling it a profound idea, which helped it gain acceptance.
Theories and contributions
- Matter waves — Every particle of momentum has an associated wavelength .
- Wave-particle duality — Matter and radiation display both particle-like and wave-like properties depending on the experiment.
Featured in chapters
Linked atoms
7 linked atoms.
21 Introduzione alla meccanica quantistica
- The four great themes of quantum mechanics
- Wave-particle duality
- De Broglie’s hypothesis
- Single-electron interference
- The electron as a standing wave
- The uncertainty principle