C LINTON J.

DAVISSON

The discovery of electron waves

Nobel Lecture, December 13, 1937

That streams of electrons possess the properties of beams of waves was dis-
covered early in 1927 in a large industrial laboratory in the midst of a great
city, and in a small university laboratory overlooking a cold and desolate
sea. The coincidence seems the more striking when one remembers that facil-
ities for making this discovery had been in constant use in laboratories
throughout the world for more than a quarter of a century. And yet the
coincidence was not, in fact, in any way remarkable. Discoveries in physics
are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before; the stage is
set, the time is ripe, and the event occurs - more often than not at widely
separated places at almost the same moment.
The setting of the stage for the discovery of electron diffraction was begun,
one may say, by Galileo. But I do not propose to emulate the gentleman
who began a history of his native village with the happenings in the Garden
of Eden. I will take, as a convenient starting-point, the events which led to
the final acceptance by physicists of the idea that light for certain purposes
must be regarded as corpuscular. This idea after receiving its quietus at the
hands of Thomas Young in 1800 returned to plague a complacent world of
physics in the year 1899. In this year Max Planck put forward his conception
that the energy of light is in some way quantized. A conception which, if
accepted, supplied, as he showed, a means of explaining completely the dis-
tribution of energy in the spectrum of black-body radiation. The quantiza-
tion was such that transfers of energy between radiation and matter occurred
abruptly in amounts proportional to the radiation frequency. The factor of
proportionality between these quantities is the ever-recurring Planck con-
stant, h. Thus was reborn the idea that light is in some sense corpuscular.
How readily this circumstantial evidence for a corpuscular aspect of light
would have been accepted as conclusive must remain a matter of conjecture,
for already the first bits of direct evidence pointing to the same conclusion
were being taken down from the scales and meters of the laboratory; the
truth about light was being wrung from Nature - at times, and in this case,
a most reluctant witness.
388 1937 C.J.DAVISSO N

In an extended examination carried on chiefly by Richardson and K. T.

Compton, Hughes, and Millikan, it was brought out that light imparts en-
ergy to individual electrons in amounts proportional to its frequency and
finally that the factor of proportionality between energy and frequency is
just that previously deduced by Planck from the black-body spectrum. The
idea of pressing the witness on the latter point had come from Einstein who
outplancked Planck in not only accepting quantization, but in conceiving of
light quanta as actual small packets or particles of energy transferable to
single electrons in toto.
The case for a corpuscular aspect of light, now exceedingly strong, be-
came overwhelmingly so when in 1922 A. H. Compton showed that in cer-
tain circumstances light quanta - photons as they were now called - have
elastic collisions with electrons in accordance with the simple laws of par-
ticle dynamics. What appeared, and what still appears to many of us as a
contradiction in terms had been proved true beyond the least possible doubt
- light was at once a flight of particles and a propagation of waves; for light
persisted, unreasonably, to exhibit the phenomenon of interference.
Troubles, it is said, never come singly, and the trials of the physicist in the
early years of this century give grounds for credence in the pessimistic say-
ing. Not only had light, the perfect child of physics, been changed into a
gnome with two heads - there was trouble also with electrons. In the open
they behaved with admirable decorum, observing without protest all the
rules of etiquette set down in Lorentz’ manual, but in the privacy of the
atom they indulged in strange and unnatural practices; they oscillated in
ways which no well-behaved mechanical system would deem proper. What
was to be said of particles which were ignorant apparently of even the rudi-
ments of dynamics? Who could apologize for such perversity - rationalize
the data of spectroscopy? A genius was called for, and a genius appeared. In
1913 Niels Bohr gave us his strange conception of "stationary" orbits in
which electrons rotated endlessly without radiating, of electrons disappearing
from one orbit and reappearing, after brief but unexplained absences, in an-
other. It was a weird picture - a picture to delight a surrealist - but one which
fascinated the beholder, for in it were portrayed with remarkable fidelity the
most salient of the orderly features which spectroscopic data were then known
to possess; there was the Balmer series! and there the Rydberg constant! -
correct to the last significant digit! It was a masterpiece. It is important to
note that in achieving this tour deforce Bohr made judicious use of the constant
which Planck had extracted from the black-body spectrum, the constant h.
 DISCOVERY OF ELECTRON WAVE S 389
It looked at this time - in the year 1913 - as if the authentic key to the
spectra had at last been found, as if only time and patience would be needed
to resolve their riddles completely. But this hope was never fulfilled. The
first brilliant triumphs of the theory were followed by yet others, but soon
the going became distressingly difficult, and finally, despite the untiring ef-
forts of countless helpers, the attack came virtually to a standstill. The feeling
grew that deeply as Bohr had dived he had not, so to speak, touched bottom.
What was wanted, it was felt, was a new approach, a new theory of the
atom which would embrace necessarily all the virtues of the Bohr theory and
go beyond it - a theory which would contain some vaguely sensed unifying
principle which, it was felt, the Bohr theory lacked.
Such an underlying principle had been sought for almost from the first.
By 1924 one or two ideas of promise had been put forward and were being
assiduously developed. Then appeared the brilliant idea which was destined
to grow into that marvelous synthesis, the present-day quantum mechanics.
Louis de Broglie put forward in his doctor’s thesis the idea that even as light,
so matter has a duality of aspects; that matter like light possesses both the
properties of waves and the properties of particles. The various "restric-
tions" of the Bohr theory were viewed as conditions for the formation of
standing electron wave patterns within the atom.
Reasoning by analogy from the situation in optics and aided by the clue
that Planck’s constant is a necessary ingredient of the Bohr’s theory, de
Broglie assumed that this constant would connect also the particle and wave
aspects of electrons, if the latter really existed. De Broglie assumed that, as
with light, the correlation of the particle and wave properties of matter
would be expressed by the relations:

(Energy of particle) E = hv(frequency, i.e. waves/unit time)

(Momentum of particle ) p = h (wave number, i.e. waves/unit distance)

The latter may be written in the more familiar for m λ = h/p, where λ rep-
resents wavelength.
Perhaps no idea in physics has received so rapid or so intensive devel-
opment as this one. De Broglie himself was in the van of this development
but the chief contributions were made by the older and more experienced
Schrödinger.
In these early days - eleven or twelve years ago - attention was focussed
on electron waves in atoms. The wave mechanics had sprung from the atom,
390 1937 C.J.DAVISSO N

so to speak, and it was natural that the first applications should be to the
atom. No thought was given at this time, it appears, to electrons in free
flight. It was implicit in the theory that beams of electrons like beams of light
would exhibit the properties of waves, that scattered by an appropriate
grating they would exhibit diffraction, yet none of the chief theorists men-
tioned this interesting corollary. The first to draw attention to it was El-
sasser, who pointed out in 1925 that a demonstration of diffraction would
establish the physical existence of electron waves. The setting of the stage
for the discovery of electron diffraction was now complete.
It would be pleasant to tell you that no sooner had Elsasser’s suggestion
appeared than the experiments were begun in New York which resulted in
a demonstration of electron diffraction - pleasanter still to say that the work
was begun the day after copies of de Broglie’s thesis reached America. The
true story contains less of perspicacity and more of chance. The work ac-
tually began in 1919 with the accidental discovery that the energy spectrum
of secondary electron emission has, as its upper limit, the energy of the pri-
mary electrons, even for primaries accelerated through hundreds of volts;
that there is, in fact, an elastic scattering of electrons by metals.
Out of this grew an investigation of the distribution-in-angle of these elas-
tically scattered electrons. And then chance again intervened; it was dis-
covered, purely by accident, that the intensity of elastic scattering varies with
the orientations of the scattering crystals. Out of this grew, quite naturally,
an investigation of elastic scattering by a single crystal of predetermined
orientation. The initiation of this phase of the work occurred in 1925, the
year following the publication of de Broglie’s thesis, the year preceding the
first great developments in the wave mechanics. Thus the New York exper-
iment was not, at its inception, a test of the wave theory. Only in the summer
of 1926, after I had discussed the investigation in England with Richardson,
Born, Franck and others, did it take on this character.
The search for diffraction beams was begun in the autumn of 1926, but
not until early in the following year were any found - first one and then
twenty others in rapid succession. Nineteen of these could be used to check
the relationship between wavelength and momentum and in every case the
correctness of the de Broglie formula, λ = h/p was verified to within the
limit of accuracy of the measurements.
I will recall briefly the scheme of the experiment. A beam of electrons of
predetermined speed was directed against a (III) face of a crystal of nickel
as indicated schematically in Fig. 1. A collector designed to accept only elas-
 DISCOVERY OF ELECTRON WAVE S 391
tically scattered electrons and their near neighbors, could be moved on an
arc about the crystal. The crystal itself could be revolved about the axis of
the incident beam. It was possible thus to measure the intensity of elastic
scattering in any direction in front of the crystal face with the exception of
those directions lying within 10 or 15 degrees of the primary beam.

Fig. I. Schematic diagram showing disposition of primary beam, nickel crystal, and
collector. Crystal shown revolved to bring one principal azimuth after another into
plane of observation.

Fig. 2. Polar diagram showing intensity of elastic scattering in A-azimuth (Fig. I)

as function of latitude angle, for series of primary-beam voltages.

The curves reproduced in Fig. 2 show the distribution-in-angle of inten-

sity for a particular azimuth of the crystal. The curves are for a series of elec-
tron speeds, therefore, for a series of electron wavelengths. For a particular
wavelength a diffraction beam shines out. Setting the collector on this beam
at its brightest, and revolving the crystal, the intensity was found to vary in
azimuth as illustrated in Fig. 3. The high peak on the left represents the cross-
392 1937 C. J.DAVISSON

section-in-azimuth of the beam shown in Fig. 2. Two similar peaks mark

the positions of companion beams which with the first form a set of three,
as required by the threefold symmetry of the crystal about its (III) direc-
tions - the direction of the incident beam. The lesser intermediate peaks are
due to a different set of beams which is not here fully developed.

Fig. 3. Curve showing intensity of elastic scattering of 54-volt primary beam as func-
tion of azimuth for latitude of peak in 54-volt curve of Fig. 2.

The de Broglie relation was tested by computing wavelengths from the

angles of the diffraction beams and the known constant of the crystal, and
comparing these with corresponding wavelengths computed from the for-
mula λ = h/p, where p, the momentum of the electrons, was obtained from
the potential used to accelerate the beam and the known value of e/m for
electrons. If wavelengths computed from the formula agreed with those ob-
tained from the diffraction data, the de Broglie relation would be verified.
How nearly the theoretical values agreed with the experimental is illustrated
in Fig. 4. For perfect agreement all points would fall on the line drawn
through the origin.
You will realize without my telling you that this series of experiments ex-
tending in time over a period of eight or nine years and requiring the con-
struction and manipulation of intricate apparatus was not made by me alone.
From first to last a considerable number of my colleagues contributed to the
investigation. Chief among these were my two exceptionally able collab-
orators, Dr. C. H. Kunsman and Dr. L. H. Germer. Dr. Kunsman worked
with me throughout the early stages of the investigation, and Dr. Germer,
 DISCOVERY OF ELECTRON WAVE S 393

Fig. 4. Test of the de Broglie formula λ = k/p = h/mv. Wavelength computed from
diffraction data plotted against I/V½, ( V, primary-beam voltage). For precise verifica-
tion of the formula all points should fall on the lin e λ, = 12.25/V ½ plotted in the dia-
gram. ( x From observations with diffraction apparatus; o same, particularly reliable;
same, grazing beams. From observations with reflection apparatus.)

to whose skill and perseverance a great part of the success of the definitive
experiments is due, succeeded Dr. Kunsman in 1924.
I would like also at this time to express my admiration of the late Dr.
H. D. Arnold, then Director of Research in the Bell Telephone Laboratories,
and of Dr. W. Wilson, my immediate superior, who were sufficiently far-
sighted to see in these researches a contribution to the science of communica-
tion. Their vision was in fact accurate, for today in our, as in other industrial
laboratories, electron diffraction is applied with great power and efficacy for
discerning the structures of materials.
But neither of this nor of the many beautiful and important researches
which have been made in electron diffraction in laboratories in all parts of
the world since 1927 will I speak today. I will take time only to express my
admiration of the beautiful experiments - differing from ours in every re-
spect - by which Thomson in far-away Aberdeen also demonstrated elec-
394 1937 C.J.DAVISSO N

tron diffraction and verified de Broglie’s formula at the same time as we in

New York. And to mention, as closely related to the subject of this discourse,
the difficult and beautifully executed experiments by which Stern and Ester-
mann in 1929 showed that atomic hydrogen also is diffracted in accordance
with the de Broglie-Schrödinger theory.
Important and timely as was the discovery of electron diffraction in inspir-
ing confidence in the physical reality of material waves, our confidence in
this regard would hardly be less today, one imagines, were diffraction yet to
be discovered, so great has been the success of the mechanics built upon the
conception of such waves in clarifying the phenomena of atomic and sub-
atomic physics.