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De Broglie’s thesis: A critical retrospective

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Edward MacKinnon; De Broglie’s thesis: A critical retrospective. Am. J. Phys. 1 November 1976; 44 (11): 1047–1055. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.10583

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Louis de Broglie’s doctoral thesis developed a concept of waves associated with material particles that was soon incorporated into wave mechanics and later supported by experimental demonstrations. De Broglie’s original development, however, relied on an incorrect identification of two quite different relations: the relation between the velocity of a particle and the relation between the group velocity of a wave packet and the velocity of individual waves in the packet. A clarification of this difference and its historial significance is followed by a tentative account of the reasons why de Broglie’s well‐known formula proved successful, though the theory supporting it rested on a conceptual confusion. Finally, this development and clarification are related to some of the difficulties involved in the attempts top fashion a coherent interpretation of quantum theory.

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5 Further steps to quantum mechanics: Louis de Broglie and the world’s most important PhD thesis

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Working on his Ph.D. thesis, Louis de Broglie asked himself this question: If light, thought to be a wave motion because of observed interference and diffraction effects, could behave like a particle, might particles exhibit some wave-like properties? He justified this idea with several arguments which are highly relevant to an understanding of quantum theory. Among these was the fact that the Bohr-Sommerfeld condition can be derived from the association of a wave with particle motion. This was a critically significant step in the development of quantum mechanics. This work was presented in a relatively short Ph.D. dissertation.

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• Published: 18 May 2023

A century of matter waves

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Nature Reviews Physics volume  5 ,  pages 318–319 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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One hundred years ago, Louis de Broglie posed a question: could matter particles behave like waves? This duality was already known for light; extending it to electrons and indeed all matter had huge implications, especially for the development of quantum mechanics.

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De Broglie's thesis: A critical retrospective

• MacKinnon, Edward

Louis de Broglie's doctoral thesis developed a concept of waves associated with material particles that was soon incorporated into wave mechanics and later supported by experimental demonstrations. De Broglie's original development, however, relied on an incorrect identification of two quite different relations: the relation between the velocity of a particle and the relation between the group velocity of a wave packet and the velocity of individual waves in the packet. A clarification of this difference and its historial significance is followed by a tentative account of the reasons why de Broglie's well-known formula proved successful, though the theory supporting it rested on a conceptual confusion. Finally, this development and clarification are related to some of the difficulties involved in the attempts top fashion a coherent interpretation of quantum theory.

• DOI: 10.1119/1.10583
• Corpus ID: 123443504

De Broglie’s thesis: A critical retrospective

• Edward Mackinnon
• Published 1 November 1976
• American Journal of Physics

43 Citations

Resolving inconsistencies in de broglie's relation, the principle of relativity and the de broglie relation, a nondispersive de broglie wave packet, planck-einstein-de broglie relations for wave packet: the acoustic world, relational space-time and de broglie waves, wave-particle duality in einstein-de broglie programs, the zero-point field waves (and) matter, recent progress in de broglie nonlinear wave mechanics, relativistic derivations of de broglie and planck-einstein equations, the diffraction and spreading of a wavepacket, related papers.

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