Louis Victor Pierre Raymond (1892-1987)
In the year 1924, a French prince surprised everyone. Louis De Broglie presented his thesis to the community. De Broglie suggested that the dualism that held for radiation should also hold for particles. Imagining that somehow wave-particle dualism was inherent in quantum phenomena, he proposed that there would be a symmetry between the behavior of electrons and photons.
Thus, in a manner analogous to the corpuscular behavior manifested by light, de Broglie suggested that electrons should exhibit wavelike behavior. From a mathematical point of view, the solution can be shown relatively simply. It had already been established, for the photon, that the linear momentum was:
Since, for particles with mass, the linear momentum is given by the product:
Q=mv
The combination of the two suggests that, according to de Broglie, an electron, of mass m and endowed with velocity v , must behave like a wave, whose wavelength would be:
Called the de Broglie wavelength .
