page_title: Nuclear fission
section_title: Discovery of nuclear fission
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear fission / History / Discovery of nuclear fission
caption_attribution_description: English: Hahn and Meitner in 1912
context_page_description: In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fission is a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay.
  Nuclear fission of heavy elements was discovered on December 17, 1938 by German Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann, and explained theoretically in January 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch. Frisch named the process by analogy with biological fission of living cells. For heavy nuclides, it is an exothermic reaction which can release large amounts of energy both as electromagnetic radiation and as kinetic energy of the fragments. Like nuclear fusion, in order for fission to produce energy, the total binding energy of the resulting elements must have a greater binding energy than that of the starting element.
  Fission is a form of nuclear transmutation because the resulting fragments are not the same element as the original atom.
context_section_description: The discovery of nuclear fission occurred in 1938 in the buildings of Kaiser Wilhelm Society for Chemistry, today part of the Free University of Berlin, following over four decades of work on the science of radioactivity and the elaboration of new nuclear physics that described the components of atoms. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a model of the atom in which a very small, dense and positively charged nucleus of protons  was surrounded by orbiting, negatively charged electrons (the Rutherford model). Niels Bohr improved upon this in 1913 by reconciling the quantum behavior of electrons (the Bohr model). Work by Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Rutherford further elaborated that the nucleus, though tightly bound, could undergo different forms of radioactive decay, and thereby transmute into other elements. (For example, by alpha decay: the emission of an alpha particle—two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle identical to a helium nucleus.)
  Some work in nuclear transmutation had been done. In 1917, Rutherford was able to accomplish transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, using alpha particles directed at nitrogen ¹⁴N + α → ¹⁷O + p.  This was the first observation of a nuclear reaction, that is, a reaction in which particles from one decay are used to transform another atomic nucleus. Eventually, in 1932, a fully artificial nuclear reaction and nuclear transmutation was achieved by Rutherford's colleagues Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft, who used artificially accelerated protons against lithium-7, to split this nucleus into two alpha particles. The feat was popularly known as "splitting the atom", and would win them the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for "Transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles", although it was not the nuclear fission reaction later discovered in heavy elements. 
  After English physicist James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome studied the results of bombarding uranium with neutrons in 1934. Fermi concluded that his experiments had created new elements with 93 and 94 protons, which the group dubbed ausonium and hesperium. However, not all were convinced by Fermi's analysis of his results, though he would win the 1938  Nobel Prize in Physics for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". The German chemist Ida Noddack notably suggested in print in 1934 that instead of creating a new, heavier element 93, that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments." However, Noddack's conclusion was not pursued at the time.
  After the Fermi publication, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann began performing similar experiments in Berlin. Meitner, an Austrian Jew, lost her Austrian citizenship with the Anschluss, the union of Austria with Germany in March 1938, but she fled in July 1938 to Sweden and started a correspondence by mail with Hahn in Berlin. By coincidence, her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, also a refugee, was also in Sweden when Meitner received a letter from Hahn dated 19 December describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium. Hahn suggested a bursting of the nucleus, but he was unsure of what the physical basis for the results were. Barium had an atomic mass 40% less than uranium, and no previously known methods of radioactive decay could account for such a large difference in the mass of the nucleus. Frisch was skeptical, but Meitner trusted Hahn's ability as a chemist. Marie Curie had been separating barium from radium for many years, and the techniques were well-known. Meitner and Frisch then correctly interpreted Hahn's results to mean that the nucleus of uranium had split roughly in half. Frisch suggested the process be named "nuclear fission", by analogy to the process of living cell division into two cells, which was then called binary fission. Jus
caption: Hahn and Meitner in 1912
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