It is found that the direct cause of crystal X-ray diffraction is closely related to Paul Peter ewald, a graduate student of Sommerfeld, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Munich. At the beginning of 19 12, Erval wrote his doctoral thesis "The Influence of Anisotropic Arrangement of Isotropic * * Oscillators on Optical Properties", which explained the birefringence phenomenon of crystals in a microscopic way. When he asked Laue for advice, Laue learned from Urals that the dipole spacing was 10-8 cm. He immediately realized that this is in the same order of magnitude as the wavelength of X-ray, and the lattice can be regarded as a three-dimensional grating. Subsequently, with the assistance of W.Friedrich, Sommerfeld's teaching assistant, and P.Knipping, a doctoral student, Laue started the experiment on April 12 and got the first Laue image. 1965438+On May 4th, 2002, Laue, Friedrich and Nipin announced in a letter to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences that their work had been successful. A month later, on June 8, Laue gave the theoretical explanation of X-ray crystal diffraction for the first time in the theoretical part of the article "Interference Phenomenon of X-rays".
Laue took the crystal as a ready-made diffraction grating instead of the original artificial grating, and made full use of the characteristics that the atomic spacing in the crystal is consistent with the X-ray wavelength in order of magnitude, and successfully determined the diffraction phenomenon of X-ray on the crystal, which not only confirmed the fluctuation of X-ray, but also provided a method for accurately measuring the X-ray wavelength.
Einstein once spoke highly of this discovery as "the best discovery in physics". Laue won the 19 14 Nobel Prize in Physics for "discovering the diffraction of X-rays through crystals".