Electronic Structure

of the Atom

Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie of the French Academy, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and Professor at the Faculty of Sciences at Paris University, was born at Dieppe (Seine Inférieure) on 15th August, 1892, the son of Victor, Duc de Broglie and Pauline d'Armaillé. After studying at the Lycée Janson of Sailly, he passed his school-leaving certificate in 1909. He applied himself first to literary studies and took his degree in history in 1910.Louis de Broglie

Between 1930 and 1950, Louis de Broglie's work has been chiefly devoted to the study of the various extensions of wave mechanics: Dirac's electron theory, the new theory of light, the general theory of spin particles, applications of wave mechanics to nuclear physics, etc. He has published numerous notes and several papers on this subject, and is the author of more than twenty-five books on the fields of his particular interests.

Louis de Broglie

Since 1951, together with young colleagues, Louis de Broglie has resumed the study of an attempt which he made in 1927 under the name of the theory of the double solution to give a causal interpretation to wave mechanics in the classical terms of space and time, an attempt which he had then abandoned in the face of the almost universal adherence of physicists to the purely probabilistic interpretation of Born, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Louis de Broglie

Professor de Broglie's most important publications are:

Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Researches on the quantum theory), Thesis Paris, 1924.

Ondes et mouvements (Waves and motions), Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1926.

Rapport au 5e Conseil de Physique Solvay, Brussels, 1927.

La mécanique ondulatoire (Wave mechanics), Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1928.

Une tentative d'interprétation causale et non linéaire de la mécanique ondulatoire: la théorie de la double solution, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1956.

Louis de Broglie

English translation: Non-linear Wave Mechanics: A Causal Interpretation, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1960.

Introduction à la nouvelle théorie des particules de M. Jean-Pierre Vigier et de ses collaborateurs, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1961.

English translation: Introduction to the Vigier Theory of elementary particles, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1963.

Étude critique des bases de l'interprétation actuelle de la mécanique ondulatoire, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1963.

English translation: The Current Interpretation of Wave Mechanics: A Critical Study, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1964.Louis de Broglie

Linus Carl Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, on 28th February, 1901, the son of a druggist, Herman Henry William Pauling, who, though born in Missouri, was of German descent, and his wife, Lucy Isabelle Darling, born in Oregon of English-Scottish ancestry.

Linus Pauling

During the years 1919-1920 he served as a full-time teacher of quantitative analysis in the State College, after which he was appointed a Teaching Fellow in Chemistry in the California Institute of Technology and was a graduate student there from 1922 to 1925, working under Professor Roscoe G. Dickinson and Richard C. Tolman. In 1925 he was awarded the Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in chemistry, with minors in physics and mathematics.Linus Pauling

Since his appointment to the Staff of California Institute of Technology, Professor Pauling was elected Research Associate in 1925; National Research Fellow in Chemistry, 1925-1926; Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1926-1927 (through this last he worked in European Universities with Sommerfeld, Schrödinger, and Bohr); Assistant Professor of Chemistry, 1927-1929; Associate Professor, 1929-1931; Linus Pauling

Professor, 1931, when he was the first recipient of the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry - the Langmuir Prize - and Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Director of the Gates and Crellin laboratories of Chemistry, 1936-1958. In 1963, he was awarded the Nobel Peace PrizeLinus Pauling

The subjects of the papers he published reflect his great scientific versatility: about 350 publications in the fields of experimental determination of the structure of crystals by the diffraction of X-rays and the interpretation of these structures in terms of the radii and other properties of atoms; the application of quantum mechanics to physical and chemical problems, including dielectric constants, X-ray doublets, momentum distribution of electrons in atoms, rotational motion of molecules in crystals, Van der Waals forces, etc.; the structure of metals and intermetallic compounds, Linus Pauling

the theory of ferromagnetism; the nature of the chemical bond, including the resonance phenomenon in chemistry; the experimental determination of the structure of gas molecules by the diffraction of electrons; the structure of proteins; the structure of antibodies and the nature of serological reactions; the structure and properties of hemoglobin and related substances; abnormal hemoglobin molecules in relation to the hereditary hemolytic anemias; the molecular theory of general anesthesia; an instrument for determining the partial pressure of oxygen in a gas; and other subjects.

Linus Pauling

Erwin Schrödinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, who was married to a daughter of Alexander Bauer, his Professor of Chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna. Erwin

Schrodinger

He was a highly gifted man with a broad education. After having finished his chemistry studies, he devoted himself for years to Italian painting. After this he took up botany, which resulted in a series of papers on plant phylogeny.

It was also his most fruitful period, being actively engaged in a variety of subjects of theoretical physics. His papers at that time dealt with specific heats of solids, with problems of thermodynamics (he was greatly interested in Boltzmann's probability theory) and of atomic spectra; in addition, he indulged in physiological studies of colour. His great discovery, Schrödinger's wave equation, was made at the end of this epoch-during the first half of 1926.

It came as a result of his dissatisfaction with the quantum condition in Bohr's orbit theory and his belief that atomic spectra should really be determined by some kind of eigenvalue problem. For this work he shared with Dirac the Nobel Prize for 1933.

Werner Heisenberg was born on 5th December, 1901, at Würzburg. He was the son of Dr. August Heisenberg and his wife Annie Wecklein. His father later became Professor of the Middle and Modern Greek languages in the University of Munich. It was probably due to his influence that Heisenberg remarked, when the Japanese physicist Yukawa discovered the particle now known as the meson and the term "mesotron" was proposed for it, that the Greek word "mesos" has no "tr" in it, with the result that the name "mesotron" was changed to "meson".Werner

Heisenberg

From 1924 until 1925 he worked, with a Rockefeller Grant, with Niels Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen, returning for the summer of 1925 to Göttingen.

Werner Heisenberg

Heisenberg's name will always be associated with his theory of quantum mechanics, published in 1925, when he was only 23 years old. For this theory and the applications of it which resulted especially in the discovery of allotropic forms of hydrogen, Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.Werner

Heisenberg

Later Heisenberg stated his famous principle of uncertainty, which lays it down that the determination of the position and momentum of a mobile particle necessarily contains errors the product of which cannot be less than the quantum constant h and that, although these errors are negligible on the human scale, they cannot be ignored in studies of the atom.Werner

Heisenberg

One of his hobbies is classical music: he is a distinguished pianist. In 1937 Heisenberg married Elisabeth Schumacher. They have seven children, and live in Munich.

Werner Heisenberg

Dirac's publications include the books Quantum Theory of the Electron (1928) and The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930; 3rd ed. 1947).

Paul A.M. Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August, 1902, at Bristol, England, his father being Swiss and his mother English. He was educated at the Merchant Venturer's Secondary School, Bristol, then went on to Bristol University. Here, he studied electrical engineering, obtaining the B.Sc. (Engineering) degree in 1921.  Paul A.M. Dirac

He then studied mathematics for two years at Bristol University, later going on to St. John's College, Cambridge, as a research student in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1926. The following year he became a Fellow of St.John's College and, in 1932, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.Paul A.M. Dirac

Dirac's work has been concerned with the mathematical and theoretical aspects of quantum mechanics. He began work on the new quantum mechanics as soon as it was introduced by Heisenberg in 1925 - independently producing a mathematical equivalent which consisted essentially of a noncommutative algebra for calculating atomic properties - and wrote a series of papers on the subject, published mainly in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, leading up to his relativistic theory of the electron (1928) and the theory of holes (1930).Paul A.M. Dirac

The importance of Dirac's work lies essentially in his famous wave equation, which introduced special relativity into Schrödinger's equation. Taking into account the fact that, mathematically speaking, relativity theory and quantum theory are not only distinct from each other, but also oppose each other, Dirac's work could be considered a fruitful reconciliation between the two theories.Paul A.M. Dirac

Carl David Anderson,  (born Sept. 3, 1905, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Jan. 11, 1991, San Marino, Calif.), American physicist who, with Victor Francis Hess of Austria, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter.Carl David

Anderson

While studying cloud-chamber photographs of cosmic rays, Anderson found a number of tracks whose orientation suggested that they were caused by positively charged particles—but particles too small to be protons. In 1932 he announced that they were caused by positrons, positively charged particles with the same mass as electrons. The claim was controversial until verified the next year by British physicist Patrick M.S. Blackett and Italian Giuseppe Occhialini.Carl David

Anderson

In 1936 Anderson discovered the mu-meson, or muon, a subatomic particle 207 times heavier than the electron. At first he thought he had found the meson, postulated by the Japanese physicist Jukawa Hideki, that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of the atom, but the muon was found to interact weakly with these particles. (The particle predicted by Yukawa was discovered in 1947 by the British physicist Cecil Powell and is known as a pi-meson, or pion.)Carl David

Anderson

Wolfgang Pauli was born on April 25th, 1900 in Vienna. He received his early education in Vienna before studying at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld. He obtained his doctor's degree in 1921 and spent a year at the University of Göttingen as assistant to Max Born and a further year with Niels Bohr at Copenhagen. Wolfgang pauli

Pauli was outstanding among the brilliant mid-twentieth century school of physicists. He was recognized as one of the leaders when, barely out of his teens and still a student, he published a masterly exposition of the theory of relativity. His exclusion principle, which is often quoted bearing his name, crystallized the existing knowledge of atomic structure at the time it was postulated and it led to the recognition of the two-valued variable required to characterize the state of an electron.

Pauli was the first to recognize the existence of the neutrino, an uncharged and massless particle which carries off energy in radioactive ß-disintegration; this came at the beginning of a great decade, prior to World War II, for his centre of research in theoretical physics at Zurich.

Pauli helped to lay the foundations of the quantum theory of fields and he participated actively in the great advances made in this domain around 1945. Earlier, he had further consolidated field theory by giving proof of the relationship between spin and"statistics" of elementary particles.

THANK YOU