De Broglie, Louis-Victor
Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie (1892-1987), a French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons. He was born in Dieppe, France, on 15th August, 1892. He served in the French army during World War I, from 1914-1918, and later returned to university where he studied general physics, specializing in theoretical physics and quanta. As part of his Ph.D. thesis in 1923, de Broglie proposed that light was not the only phenomenon that exhibits a wave-particle duality. He proposed that ordinary “particles”, such as electrons, protons, or even bowling balls, could also exhibit wave characteristics in certain circumstances. He earned his doctorate from Paris University in 1924 after presenting his thesis, Recherches sur la Théorie des Quanta (Researches on the quantum theory). In the following two decades, circa 1930-1950, he focused his studies on wave mechanics. He was elected as a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Institute in 1933. Erwin Schrödinger and others later used de Broglie’s theory of electron matter waves to develop wave mechanics, a theory that transformed our knowledge of physical phenomena on the atomic scale. Louis-Victor de Broglie died on March 19, 1987.
Further Reading
Louis de Broglie - Biography (Nobel Foundation)
Broglie Biography (University of St. Andrews, Scotland, School of Mathematics and Statistics)
