Schrödinger, Erwin (1887–1961)

Austrian physicist. He advanced the study of wave mechanics to describe the behaviour of electrons in atoms. In 1926 he produced a solid mathematical explanation of the quantum theory and the structure of the atom. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 for his work in the development of quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger's mathematical description of electron waves superseded matrix mechanics, developed in 1925 by Max Born and Werner Heisenberg, which also described the structure of the atom mathematically but, unlike wave mechanics, gave no picture of the atom. It was later shown that wave mechanics is equivalent to matrix mechanics.

Schrödinger was born and educated in Vienna. He was professor at Zürich, Switzerland, 1921–33. With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, he went to Oxford, England, in 1933. Homesick, he returned to Austria in 1936 to take up a post at Graz, but the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 forced him into exile, and he worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland, 1939–56. He spent his last years at the University of Vienna. French physicist Louis de Broglie had in 1924, using ideas from Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, shown that an electron or any other particle has a wave associated with it. In 1926 both Schrödinger and de Broglie published the same wave equation, which Schrödinger later formulated in terms of the energies of the electron and the field in which it was situated. He solved the equation for the hydrogen atom and found that it fitted with energy levels proposed by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. In the hydrogen atom, the wave function describes where we can expect to find the electron. Although it is most likely to be close to one of the orbits of the Bohr atom, it does not follow a circular orbit but is described by the more complicated notion of an orbital, a region in space where the electron can be found with varying degrees of probability. Atoms other than hydrogen, and also molecules and ions, can be described by Schrödinger's wave equation, but such cases are very difficult to solve.