WAVING MECHANICS
Quantum Mechanics
Well, as we saw earlier in the previous topic, we can see that physical phenomena are mainly related to fundamental matter (atoms, electrons, protons, etc.) Physics has hitherto entered an apparently indecipherable enigma! Particles behave like waves and vice versa.
Good! The following contents are abstract and advanced Physics concepts. I ask that for you student have an open mind for the new concepts that we will outline to you now. It is exactly at this point that we will be able to see the real break between Modern Physics and Classical Physics, as we mentioned earlier! A completely different universe already seen in the physics classes taught in your classroom. To better understand quantum laws we must understand these two fundamental concepts of the theory "De Broglie's wave and particle duality" and "Heinsenberg's Uncertainty Principle".
Louis Victor de Broglie understood, in 1925, the dual character of light for matter. For representing a great step for Physics, de Broglie received, in 1929, the Nobel Prize in Physics. One question that certainly occurred to him was that if light, until then considered to be a wave, behaved like a particle in certain situations, why couldn't the electron, considered to be a particle, also behave like a wave depending on experience? According to de Broglie, matter could also exhibit such a dual behavior.
De Broglie's proposal for the wave-particle duality for matter extends to all matter like protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules and not just electrons. Here's the problem: what is the wavelength associated with a particle so that it can be described as a wave? To answer this question, Broglie presented the following relation ...
In short, de Broglie's Principle assigns a wavelength of matter to any mass m with velocity v. In other words, all matter has an associated wavelength. To better understand this concept, let's look at an example with a baseball. Calculating the wavelength of de Broglie associated with a baseball with a mass of 400 g that moves at a speed of 10 m / s, we find:
Thus, there is no way to verify the wave behavior for an object with a wavelength of this order of magnitude. This length is so small that it is 10 ^ 19 [(^) represents a number high to] times smaller than the nucleus of the atom. Remember that to observe a wave behavior we can fix situations that show diffraction and interference (typical wave properties). However, the obstacles and / or openings that we need to place in the wave path must have a dimension (size) in the same order as the wavelength of the wave that we want to see diffract or interfere with.