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While Clinton Davisson worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he and Lester Germer set about on experimenting on the properties of electron beams shot through a nickel crystal – specifically, polycrystalline nickel that was bombarded at normal incidence by the electron beam. The detector they were using measured the scattering of electrons with respect to the incident electron beam.  This experimentation was conducted with an industrial application in mind – to research filaments for vacuum tubes – instead of under theoretical guidance.

Testing different crystals and intensities of electrons, they found a smooth angular distribution of scattered electrons for the polycrystalline samples. In 1925, after a laboratory accident, a monocrystalline form of the nickel crystal was inadvertently produced and subsequently used for experimentation. The result of shining a light through this monocrystalline sample provided a reading of sharp peaks at certain angles, which was in contrast to the polycrystalline samples.

Davisson did not realize the significance of this finding until he attended a meeting at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Here, he learned about de Broglie waves and Schrödinger’s equation, which lead him to the realization that he and his partner had stumbled upon data that helped support de Broglie’s wave equation and Bragg’s law. The Davisson-Germer experiment carries much significance in the world of physics by supporting the two aforementioned formulas, and consequently helping prove that particles could indeed act like waves, just as waves could act like particles. Germer and Davisson reported their findings in 1927, and subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 along with G.P. Thomson.