After Einstein put forth his photoelectric effect, people wondered what about the instances where light behaved as a wave?
In 1923, the French physicist Louis de Broglie made an assertion. His Consideration of Einstein's equation of wavelength lambda to momentum p, de Broglie said that the relationship determines the wavelength, in the relationship:
λ = h / p Where h is the Planck's constant
This wavelength λ is called the de Broglie wavelength.
The de Broglie hypothesis states that particles of matter also have wavelengths and can behave as waves, like photons .According to String ,both types of particles demonstrated the vibrating strings, but 50 years before.
Here was de Broglie’s line of …show more content…
(1925 was not the double slit experiment .It was actually performed in 1968).
Experimental Confirmation
In 1927, physicists Davisson and Germer performed an experiment in which they fired electrons at a crystalline nickel target.
The observed diffraction pattern matched the predictions of the de Broglie wavelength. De Broglie was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for the theory (this was the first time when he was awarded for a Ph.D. thesis) and Davisson/Germer together won it in 1937 for the experimental discovery of electron diffraction. All this proved the hypothesis to be …show more content…
The beam of electrons must hit the screen in one specific spot, as if you were throwing baseballs through a hole against a wall. (Hence quantum physics challenged our classical thinking about objects and was deemed controversial in its early years.)
In fact, when a slit is closed, the interference pattern disappears — the photons or electrons form a single band that spreads out from the brightest spot at the centre.
So the interference patterns can’t be explained by particles bouncing off the side of the slits or anything normal like that. It’s a genuinely strange behaviour that required a genuinely weird solution — in the form of quantum mechanics.
Deriving the De Broglie Wavelength mathematically
De Broglie derived his equation using well established theories through the following series of substitutions:
1. De Broglie first used Einstein's famous equation relating matter and energy: E = mc2
Where,
• E = energy,
• m = mass,
• c = speed of light
2. Every quantum of a wave has a discrete amount of energy given by Planck's equation:
E=hν
Where,
• E =