Louis de Broglie
French physicist
Who was Louis de Broglie?
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie (French: [də bʁɔj] ; 15 August 1892 – 19 March 1987) was a French theoretical physicist and aristocrat known for his contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 Ph.D. thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. The wave-like behaviour of particles theorized by de Broglie was used by Erwin Schrödinger in his formulation of wave mechanics. De Broglie presented an alternative interpretation of these mechanics called the pilot-wave concept at the 1927 Solvay Conferences, but then abandoned it. In 1952, David Bohm developed a new form of the concept which became known as the de Broglie–Bohm theory.
De Broglie revisited the idea in 1956, creating another version that incorporated ideas from Bohm and Jean-Pierre Vigier.
Historical significance
In 1929, de Broglie won the Nobel Prize in Physics, after the wave-like behaviour of matter was experimentally confirmed in 1927. This confirmation earned George Paget Thomson and Clinton Davisson the Nobel in 1937.
