George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson (1892–1975) was an English physicist who demonstrated electron diffraction and shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the wave properties of electrons.

Electron diffraction: The scattering of electrons by matter to produce patterns governed by their wave behavior. Thomson used diffraction patterns from thin films to demonstrate that electrons behave as waves.
J. J. Thomson: English physicist who discovered the electron and received the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics. George Paget Thomson was his son, and their contrasting work on electrons became a scientific irony.
Clinton Davisson: American physicist who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering electron diffraction. Davisson received the same prize for independent evidence of electron wave behavior.
Electron microscopy: Imaging methods that use electron beams to resolve structures smaller than visible-light microscopes can distinguish. Electron wave behavior underlies the focusing and resolution limits of electron microscopes.
Davisson–Germer experiment: A 1927 experiment that observed electron diffraction from a nickel crystal. This independent experiment confirmed electron waves using a different arrangement from Thomson’s.
Louis de Broglie: French physicist who proposed that matter has wave properties and received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics. His 1924 thesis supplied the wave hypothesis Thomson later tested experimentally.
Lester Germer: American physicist who collaborated with Clinton Davisson on electron diffraction experiments. Germer helped produce the crystal-scattering results recognized alongside Thomson’s work.
Transmission electron microscopy: A microscopy technique that forms images from electrons transmitted through a thin specimen. The electron scattering Thomson studied is central to interpreting images in this method.
De Broglie hypothesis: Louis de Broglie’s proposal that particles have wavelengths inversely proportional to their momentum. It predicted the electron wavelengths that Thomson’s diffraction patterns supported.
Electron: A negatively charged elementary particle found in atoms and responsible for electric current. Thomson’s experiment addressed whether this particle also has wave-like properties.

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