The crystal’s lattice-like structure provides a built-in array of “slits” narrow enough to scatter the electron waves. Word spread rapidly throughout the physics community, earning the admiration of Einstein himself, who wrote that de Broglie had “lifted a corner of the great veil.”Ī graduate student at the University of Gottingen named Walter Elsasser suggested a possible experiment to detect the matter waves: shining a beam of electrons through a crystal. The paper made de Broglie’s career, since he had thus far mostly been known as Maurice’s younger brother. This work became his doctoral thesis, published in the Annales de Physique in 1925–all 100 pages. Because their “wavelengths” were so small, such “matter waves” wouldn’t affect the macro-world their effects would only appear at the atomic scale. All “particles” and all “waves” were in fact a mix of both.
In 1923, de Broglie later wrote, “After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea… that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalized by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons.” Even a simple water wave is granular at the atomic level, he reasoned, since it is composed of the coordinated motion of a horde of water molecules. He published his first papers on the underlying quantum theory of that work. When the war ended, he worked with Maurice on the latter’s experiments on x-rays and the photoelectric effect, so ably explained by Albert Einstein in 1905. Thanks to Maurice’s influence, Louis spent much of the war at the radiotelegraphy station at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, maintaining the equipment for sending wireless transmissions. Louis attended Henri Poincaré’s lectures on electrodynamics, thermodynamics, and related subjects, but it was his chance reading of the report of the first Solvay Conference on quantum theory that ignited his imagination, and he chose to make physics his career.īut first Louis had to complete his mandatory military service, just as World War I broke out. In fact, Maurice maintained his own home laboratory at the family residence in Paris.
Louis excelled in French, history, physics and philosophy, “indifferent in mathematics,” and not good at drawing and foreign languages, but no one subject held his full attention.ĭe Broglie studied history and law at the Sorbonne, thinking he would join the civil service, but then he became enthralled with theoretical physics, no doubt influenced in part by Maurice, also a physicist. When his father died in 1906, his older brother Maurice took him in and sent him to study at the Lyćee Janson de Sailly. His sister envisioned a shining future as a statesman for the young Louis, given his love for history and politics. He favored blue jackets with breeches and buckled shoes at dinner, and memorized entire scenes from classical theater to recite for guests of the family. He was a lively, charming, and precocious child, according to letters written by his elder sister, with a pronounced flair for the dramatic. The French physicist Louis de Broglie extended the notion of particle/wave duality to electrons in 1925.īorn in 1892 in Dieppe, Prince Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymont was the younger son of the 5th duc de Broglie, one of the oldest noble families of France. But this strange characteristic is not limited to photons. Max Planck first proposed the notion of quanta in 1900 to explain blackbody radiation, and, with Einstein’s additional insights in 1905, this led to the resolution of the longstanding debate over whether light is a particle or wave: it is both. One of the weirdest aspects of life on the quantum scale is the fact that all particles sometimes behave like waves.