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I had an interesting conversation with CuriousOne the other day about the question Experiment that demonstrates the wave-particle duality of electrons. I thought that wave-particle duality existed, CuriousOne thought it didn't (whether CuriousOne thought this wasn't true for both light and matter, or just matter I'm not really sure). Some of the comments were really interesting, and I wanted to know what some of the physicists here thought.

The comments on the question are just below the main question, and are just below my answer to the question (now moved to chat). Please don't close this with "not enough research" as the reason, I did look into it, but some of CuriousOne's comments left me kind of confused.

In terms of people thinking this is a duplicate: I am asking whether there is experimental evidence for electrons having a wave-particle duality (this duality being like the one light has) and whether the double-slit experiment is an example of experimental evidence for this.

Question:

Was de Broglie's hypothesis that electrons (and other matter) have wave-particle duality correct? Does the double-slit experiment prove this, or have anything to do with this? What is some experimental evidence for de Broglie's hypothesis?

Thanks!

Community
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auden
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1 Answers1

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Yes, there is a duality and in the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) it is not even a contradiction at all. It seems pretty natural.

All fields and particles are treated very similarly in the QFT language. Both are fields in space-time, so “waves”. There is a suble difference in the spin statistics, namely that fields corresponding to ordinary matter (fermions) have canonical anticommutation relations whereas “ordinary fields” like photons (bosons) have commutation relations. One consequence is that no two fermions can be in the same state (momentum, position, …).

So far this only describes waves. The commutation relations then limit the excitation of the fields to integer numbers. Those things are called particles.

Therefore QFT describes particles as the smallest quantized excitation of the field.

Martin Ueding
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