Matter behaving as a wave was first demonstrated experimentally for electrons: a beam of electrons can exhibit diffraction, just like a beam of light or a water wave. Three years after de Broglie published his hypothesis two different groups demonstrated electron diffraction. At the University of Aberdeen, George Paget Thomson and Alexander Reid passed a beam of electrons through a thin celluloid film, then later metal films, and observed the predicted interference patterns. (Alexander Reid, who was Thomson's graduate student, performed the first experiments but he died soon after in a motorcycle accident and is rarely mentioned.) At Bell Labs, Clinton Joseph Davisson and Lester Halbert Germer reflected an electron beam from a nickel sample in their experiment, observing well-defined beams predicted by wave models returning form the crystal. De Broglie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 for his hypothesis; Thomson and Davisson shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for their experimental work.