Louis de Broglie (born 15.07.1892) is a French theoretical physicist, one of the creators of quantum mechanics, a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1933) and its permanent secretary in 1942 — 75. He was born in Dieppe. He graduated from the University of Paris (1913), where he was professor in 1928—62.
His research is in the fields of classical and quantum mechanics, field theory, quantum electrodynamics and the history and methodology of physics. In 1923 he extended A. Einstein's idea of the dual nature of light to matter, suggesting that a stream of material particles must also possess wave properties uniquely related to mass and energy. In other words, de Broglie matched the motion of a particle with the propagation of a wave. This correspondence soon (1927) received brilliant confirmation in experiments on the diffraction of electrons in crystals. He developed the idea of the wave properties of matter (de Broglie waves) in a series of papers in 1924 and especially in his doctoral dissertation (1924).
E. Schrödinger used this idea of the universality of wave-particle duality in creating his wave mechanics. For the discovery of the wave nature of the electron de Broglie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. With a view to interpreting quantum mechanics he put forward in 1927 the concept of the pilot wave.
A member of a number of academies of sciences and scientific societies and a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958).