Lester Germer

Lester Germer was an American physicist who collaborated with Clinton Davisson at Bell Labs. Their electron-scattering experiments provided experimental evidence for the wave nature of electrons.

Clinton Davisson: An American physicist who, with Lester Germer, experimentally demonstrated electron diffraction from a nickel crystal. Germer’s Bell Labs collaborator and co-recipient of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Davisson–Germer experiment: An experiment in which electrons scattered from a nickel crystal produced diffraction patterns consistent with wave behavior. This is the central experiment Germer conducted with Davisson at Bell Labs.
Matter wave: A wave associated with a particle, whose wavelength is inversely proportional to its momentum. Electron diffraction provided direct evidence for this broader quantum-mechanical idea.
Bell Labs: An industrial research organization founded by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and Western Electric. Germer and Davisson performed their electron-scattering research at this laboratory.
Louis de Broglie: A French physicist who proposed that matter has wave properties, with wavelength proportional to Planck’s constant divided by momentum. His matter-wave hypothesis gave the Davisson–Germer diffraction results their theoretical significance.
Electron diffraction: The scattering of electrons by a material in patterns governed by their wave properties and the material’s structure. The observed diffraction was the experimental phenomenon at the heart of Germer’s research.
Wave–particle duality: The principle that quantum objects exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties in different experimental contexts. Germer’s electrons arrived as particles but produced a wave-like diffraction pattern.
University of California, Berkeley: A public research university in Berkeley, California, founded in 1868. Germer later worked there with Ernest O. Lawrence.
George Paget Thomson: A British physicist who demonstrated electron diffraction independently using thin metal films. His independent confirmation helped establish electron waves alongside the Davisson–Germer work.
Bragg's law: A relation connecting the wavelength and incidence angle of waves diffracted by crystal planes to their spacing. It let researchers interpret the nickel crystal’s scattering angles as evidence of electron wavelength.

Linked from 5 pages

Double-slit experimentRelated: His measurements provided early experimental evidence for matter waves.