Download Louis de Broglie

LOUIS DE BROGLIE
Madison Rhodes and Taylor Bostick
BRIEF HISTORY OVERVIEW
7th duc de Brogli
 Born at Dieppe on August 15th, 1892
 Died March 19th, 1987, at 95
 He was a Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at
Paris University as well as a member of the
French Academy and a Permanent Secretary of
the Academy of Sciences.
 His first degree was in history
 Helped to develop radio communications during
WWI
 Received his doctor’s degree in 1924 after
delivering his famous thesis, Recherches sur la
Théorie des Quanta, on quantum theory

THE NEW THEORY
OF LIGHT
In his thesis of 1924, de Broglie first suggested
that light could behave as either a stream of
particles or as a wave, but not both at once
 de Broglie reasoned that if light, despite its
traditional wave motion, could take on a
corpuscular form, then small particles including
electrons could share wave-like characteristics

NEW THEORY OF LIGHT, CONT.

Five years after de Broglie initially proposed this
idea, two American scientists, Davisson and Germer,
working at the Bell Telephone Laboratory were
successful in diffracting, or bending into shadows, a
beam of electrons using crystal
**Their experiment proved de Broglie’s New Theory of
Light
**de Broglie’s theory served as the basis of what would
one day be known to the world as wave mechanics
BEGINNINGS OF WAVE MECHANICS

Wave mechanics “is a form of quantum theory
in which happenings on the atomic scale are
explained in terms of interactions between
systems of waves, represented by wave functions”
de Broglie’s matter and wave particle duality equation:
where is the wavelength, is the Planck constant, is the
momentum, is the rest mass, is the velocity and is the speed of
light in a vacuum.”
**de Broglie’s later studies became devoted to the extensions
of wave mechanics, such as Dirac’s electron theory, the
general theory of spin particles, etc.**
INTERNAL CLOCK HYPOTHESIS
1924 de Broglie hypothesized that the electron
has an internal clock that “constitutes part of the
mechanism by which a pilot wave guides a
particle.”
 Pilot wave is the first example of a hidden
variable (also hypothesized by de Broglie), and is
one of several interpretations of quantum
mechanics

INTERNAL ELECTRON CLOCK
HYPOTHESIS, CONT.
de Broglie’s initial idea that the electron has an
internal clock has just of late been confirmed by
measuring the period of the clock in an electron
channeling experiment. This result can be explained
by the Zitter model, a new model of the electron
 The Zitter model incorporates Schroedinger’s
qualitative zitterbewegung concept into a fully
specified interacting particle model
**the Zitter electron is a “lightlike charged particle with
intrinsic spin that maintains it in a helical space-time
path, with curvature and frequency determined by the
electron mass.” Therefore, electron mass is fully reduced
to clock frequency in electron motion

HIDDEN THERMODYNAMICS
An attempt to bring together the three furthest
principles of physics: the Principles of Fermat,
Maupertuis, and Carnot
 In hidden thermodynamics, action becomes an
opposite of entropy:

GENERALIZATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF
LEAST ACTION
De Broglie combined the “equivalence of the
mechanical principle of least action with
Fermat’s optical principle”
 A century earlier Hamilton had brought notice to
this equivalence but failed to produce sufficient
enough evidence to support it

NON-NULLITY AND VARIABILITY OF MASS

After the rejection of his hypothesis of a
massless photon, de Broglie was able to doubt the
hypothesis of the expansion of the universe,
meaning that he believed the true mass of
particles was not constant, but variable, and that
each particle can be represented as a
thermodynamic machine equivalent to a cyclic
integral of action.
NEUTRINO THEORY OF LIGHT
The idea that the photon is equivalent to the
fusion of two Dirac neutrinos
 The theory implies that the neutrino and the
photon both have masses that are non-zero,
though very low

DE BROGLIE’S DEPICTION OF ATOMS AND
THEIR ELECTRONS
AWARDS
Won Nobel prize 1929 in physics on his wave
nature of electrons discovery
 1929 Henri Poincare Medal
 1938 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

REFERENCES
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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laurea
tes/1929/broglie-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie
http://www.bing.com/search?q=what%20are%20wave
%20mechanics&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=what%20are
%20wave%20mechanics&sc=1-22&sp=1&sk=&cvid=211bb4b1c1e54fbfb16a158a04c9286f
http://the-history-of-theatom.wikispaces.com/Louis+de+Broglie
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/de_Brogl
ie_and_matter_waves.html
http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contestfiles/Hestenes_Electron_time_essa.pdf