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Louis de Broglie. Wavicles

Helge Kastrup, Jeffry V. Mallow A

Published Sep 27, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Louis de Broglie received the Nobel Prize for his Ph.D. It is an extreme statement but not as extreme as one might think. In his 1924 doctoral dissertation, he asserted that all matter had both wave and particle properties. His thesis stemmed from Einstein's recognition that light had particle properties. Until then it was assumed, and every experiment had shown, that light was strictly a wave. With the photoelectric effect explained by Einstein, light became an example of “wave-particle duality.” Before de Broglie, it was the only example. De Broglie proposed that all matter had both wave and particle properties. De Broglie found the relationship between the two: the particle momentum was inversely proportional to the wavelength. Experimental evidence subsequently confirmed his theory, hence the Prize.

DOI
10.1063/9780735421721_011

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Louis de Broglie received the Nobel Prize for his Ph.D. It is an extreme statement but not as extreme as one might think. In his 1924 doctoral dissertation, he asserted that all matter had both wave and particle properties. His thesis stemmed from Einstein's recognition that light had particle properties. Until then it was assumed, and every experiment had shown, that light was strictly a wave. With the photoelectric effect explained by Einstein, light became an example of “wave-particle duality.” Before de Broglie, it was the only example. De Broglie proposed that all matter had both wave and particle properties. De Broglie found the relationship between the two: the particle momentum was inversely proportional to the wavelength. Experimental evidence subsequently confirmed his theory, hence the Prize.
Abstract The particle-wave duality was perhaps the most startling outcome of the conceptual revolution that swept through physics during the first three decades of the twentieth century. That photons—the packets, or quanta, of light— behaved in some respects as particles, in others as waves, had already been noted when the due (later Prince) Louis de Broglie conjectured that the same might be true of other particles, such as electrons. Sitting in an eyrie in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorological observer during the First World War, de Broglie had time to ruminate on these matters and to develop an equation relating the momentum of the particle to its wavelength. This formed the substance of his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted to the University of Paris in 1924 and which earned him the Nobel Prize five years later.
Louis De Broglie is one of the principal architects of quantum theory. It is to him that we owe the idea of the particle as having some sort of wavelike functionality and the wave particle duality. Despite having invented this idea, de Broglie had his doubts and spent much of the rest of his life trying in vain to justify his assertion for which he had won the Nobel Prize. Essentially de Broglie’s notion of the particle as a wave is a restatement of the assumption adopted by Niels Bohr in his model for the hydrogen atom, notably that angular momentum is quantised. De Broglie does however provide us with two useful insights: that the energy levels of the atom are in some way associated with a harmonic sequence and that there is some sort of frequency multiplication process taking place within the atom.
A physically real wave associated with any moving particle and travelling in a surrounding material medium was introduced by Louis de Broglie in a series of short notes in 1923 and in a more complete form in his thesis defended in Paris on the 25th November 1924. This result, recognised by the Nobel Prize in 1929, gave rise to a major direction of "new physics" known today as "quantum mechanics". However, although such notions as "de Broglie wavelength" and "wave-particle duality" form the basis of the standard quantum theory, it actually only takes for granted (postulates) the formula for the particle wavelength and totally ignores the underlying causal, realistic and physically transparent picture of wave-particle dynamics outlined by Louis de Broglie in his thesis and further considerably developed in his later works, in the form of "double solution" and "hidden thermodynamics" theory. A price to pay for such rough deviation from the original de Broglian realism and consistency involves fundamental physics domination by purely abstract and mechanistically simplified schemes of formal symbols and rules that have led to a deep knowledge impasse justly described as "the end of science". However, a new, independent approach of "quantum field mechanics" (quant-ph/9902015, quant-ph/9902016, physics/0401164) created within the "universal science of complexity" (physics/9806002) provides many-sided confirmation and natural completion of de Broglie's "nonlinear wave mechanics", eliminating all its "difficult points" and reconstituting the causally complete, totally consistent and intrinsically unified picture of the real, complex micro-world dynamics directly extendible to all higher levels of unreduced world complexity.
Where did we get that [equation] from? Nowhere. It is not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger. Richard Feynman De Broglie's matter waves The early struggles of physicists towards a quantum theory were mostly concerned with attempts to understand the nature of light. The traditional picture of light as a wave motion had been challenged by Planck and Einstein. They had shown that certain experimental results that were impossible to understand in terms of a wave picture could be easily explained if light was thought of as a stream of particles, now called photons. William Bragg, who, with his son, won the 1915 Nobel Prize for studies of crystal structure using X-rays, summarized this dilemma for physics by exclaiming in despair that he was teaching the corpuscular theory of light on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the undulatory theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays! Physicists were still wrestling with these apparently contradictory properties of light when, in 1924, Prince Louis de Broglie (pronounced ‘de Broy’) suggested that all matter, even objects that we usually think of as particles – such as electrons – should also display wavelike behaviour! This revolutionary idea was completely unexpected and, what is more, was included by de Broglie in his Ph. D. thesis. Like most people, physicists are generally reluctant to accept any wild new idea, especially if there is not a shred of evidence to support it.
The long history of the dispute among physicists as to whether matter is composed of particles or waves is reviewed. A turning point came at the dawn of the 20th century in the form of the de Broglie momentum-wavelength and Bohr/Planck energy frequency relations. It was on this basis that Schrödinger developed a quantum mechanical differential equation whose solution came to be known as a wave function. The Born Interpretation of these functions holds that their absolute square constitutes a probability distribution which has been used successfully to make predictions of the properties of the system under discussion. It is pointed out that the phenomenon of light refraction played a key role in the development of both Newton’s corpuscular theory of light and the competing theory of Huygens which looks upon light as consisting exclusively of waves. It is shown that Newton’s failure to predict the decrease in the speed of light as it passes from air into water was not because of his belief in the particle composition of light, but rather because he not did anticipate that the mass of a photon changes upon entering a medium of higher index of refraction n. By assuming that the energy E of light is equal pc/n, where p is the momentum of the photons and c is the speed of light in free space, it is shown that the experimental dependence of the speed the light on its wavelength as it passes through a transparent medium is derived successfully through the use of Hamilton’s Canonical Equations and Newton’s Second Law of Kinetics. It is suggested that the relationship between particles and waves can be understood by noting that the localized properties of matter exhibit themselves in experiments such as the photoelectric effect where attention can be concentrated on the behavior of a single particle. The corresponding wave properties occur when large numbers of particles are observed under exactly similar circumstances, as for example in electron diffraction. ...........