Historical Context
At the end of the 19th century, light was thought to consist of waves of electromagnetic fields which propagated according to Maxwell’s equations, while matter was thought to consist of localized particles (See history of wave and particle viewpoints). This division was challenged when, in his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, Albert Einstein postulated that light was emitted and absorbed as localized packets, or "quanta" (now called photons). These quanta would have an energy
where is the frequency of the light and h is Planck’s constant. Einstein’s postulate was confirmed experimentally by Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the next two decades. Thus it became apparent that light has both wave-like and particle-like properties. De Broglie, in his 1924 PhD thesis, sought to expand this wave-particle duality to all particles:
| “ | When I conceived the first basic ideas of wave mechanics in 1923-24, I was guided by the aim to perform a real physical synthesis, valid for all particles, of the coexistence of the wave and of the corpuscular aspects that Einstein had introduced for photons in his theory of light quanta in 1905. | ” |
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—De Broglie |
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In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published an equation describing how this matter wave should evolve — the matter wave equivalent of Maxwell’s equations — and used it to derive the energy spectrum of hydrogen. That same year Max Born published his now-standard interpretation that the square of the amplitude of the matter wave gives the probability to find the particle at a given place. This interpretation was in contrast to De Broglie’s own interpretation, in which the wave corresponds to the physical motion of a localized particle.
Read more about this topic: Matter Wave
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