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Concept
Davisson–Germer experiment
Summary
The Davisson–Germer experiment was a 1923-27 experiment by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer at Western Electric (later Bell Labs), in which electrons, scattered by the surface of a crystal of nickel metal, displayed a diffraction pattern. This confirmed the hypothesis, advanced by Louis de Broglie in 1924, of wave-particle duality, and also the wave mechanics approach of the Schrödinger equation. It was an experimental milestone in the creation of quantum mechanics.
According to Maxwell's equations in the late 19th century, light was thought to consist of waves of electromagnetic fields and matter was thought to consist of localized particles. However, this was challenged in Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, which described light as discrete and localized quanta of energy (now called photons), which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. In 1924 Louis de Broglie presented his thesis concerning the wave–particle duality theory, which proposed the idea that all matter displays the wave–particle duality of photons. According to de Broglie, for all matter and for radiation alike, the energy of the particle was related to the frequency of its associated wave by the Planck relation:
And that the momentum of the particle was related to its wavelength by what is now known as the de Broglie relation:
where h is Planck's constant.
An important contribution to the Davisson–Germer experiment was made by Walter M. Elsasser in Göttingen in the 1920s, who remarked that the wave-like nature of matter might be investigated by electron scattering experiments on crystalline solids, just as the wave-like nature of X-rays had been confirmed through X-ray scattering experiments on crystalline solids.
This suggestion of Elsasser was then communicated by his senior colleague (and later Nobel Prize recipient) Max Born to physicists in England. When the Davisson and Germer experiment was performed, the results of the experiment were explained by Elsasser's proposition.
Official source
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