French physicist and professor, born in Dieppe, prince and later seventh Duke of Broglie, who established a correspondence between wave and particle and formulated wave mechanics. Descendant of an aristocratic family of rich and noble Italians from Piedmont, living in France (1640), of illustrious military, politicians and diplomats, he graduated in a Degree in History (1910) and soon after he attended a year of Right.
But the great repercussion that the great transformations in Physics reached at the time, made it follow its brother Maurice Broglie (1875-1960), 17 years older, who broke with this family tradition and dedicated himself to physics. Maurice encouraged him to read the works of Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), which dealt with application of mathematical analysis to astronomical problems and to certain physical phenomena in the world macroscopic.
With his brother as secretary of the 1st Solvay Congress (1911), which was attended by leading physics experts from around the world, he also had the rare opportunity to read the copies of the latest works and studies of Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858-1947) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955) relativistic. These initial works demonstrated the insufficiency of classical theories to explain new phenomena discovered and the need to introduce the concept of quantum of light. His enthusiasm was so great that he immediately decided on a career as a physicist, dropping his history studies.
So, stimulated by these new concepts, he eagerly sought a rationale for this new way of studying light. With a degree in physical sciences, during World War I he was engaged and went to work in the radiotelegraphy service of the French army, period in which he improved his studies on the electromagnetism. After World War I he continued working in theoretical physics in his brother Maurice's laboratory, researching the structure of matter using X-rays. Under these conditions, he managed to mature the revolutionary ideas that would be exposed in his doctoral thesis.
He defended his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (1924), the result of research on the theory of quantum, a formulation that marked the emergence of wave mechanics, the wave motion of particles, associating the principles of classical mechanics with those of optics and thus enabling the invention of the electron microscope (1927). To formulate his theory, he made the following analogy: if nature had been shown to be essentially symmetrical, for example, existing positive and negative charges, cold and heat etc. and, furthermore, the observable universe was composed entirely of matter and energy, such as light, cosmic rays etc, and if light had a wave and particle behavior at the same time, maybe the same would happen with matter. Physically his theory associated any particle in motion with a wavelength given by the expression l= h / mv, where Planck's constant h appears, the mass of the particle m and its velocity scale v.
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Initially received with reservations, the experimental proof of the wave theory of matter would be made four years after the publication of his thesis of PhD, through the decisive experience of American physicists Clinton Joseph Davisson (1881-1958), also a Nobel (1937), and Lester Halbert Germer (1896-1971). Appointed professor (1928) at the Henri Poincaré Institute, Sorbonne University, Paris, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics (1929) for discovery of the wavelike behavior of electrons, becoming, at the age of 37, one of the youngest members of the awards gallery Nobel.
He won the Kalinga Prize, awarded by UNESCO (1952). Admitted as a Member of the Academy of Sciences (1933) and of the French Academy of Letters for his talent as a writer (1944), he also published important works on theoretical physics, history and philosophy of sciences, as Introduction à l'étude de la mécanique ondulatoire (1930), translated into English as An Introduction to the Study of Wave Mechanics (1930), Revolution in Physics (tr. 1953) and Non-Linear Wave Mechanics (tr. 1960) and Certitudes et incertitudes de la science (1966) and died in Paris.
Figures copied from the TURNBULL WWW SERVER website:
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
Order R - Biography - Brazil School
