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Fission is a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei and often other particles. The fission process often produces gamma rays and releases a very large amount of energy, even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay.
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. [28] [29] [30]
The feat was popularly known as "splitting the atom", although it was not the modern nuclear fission reaction discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and their assistant Fritz Strassmann in heavy elements. [8] In 1941, Rubby Sherr, Kenneth Bainbridge and Herbert Lawrence Anderson reported the nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold. [9]
Atoms split naturally, but in 1919, Rutherford oversaw the first artificially-induced nuclear reaction in human history at the Victoria University of Manchester's laboratories.
Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known to be lighter than that nucleus.
The term "compound atom" was confusing to some of Dalton's contemporaries as the word "atom" implies indivisibility, but he responded that if a carbon dioxide "atom" is divided, it ceases to be carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide "atom" is indivisible in the sense that it cannot be divided into smaller carbon dioxide particles. [4] [19]
Nuclear fission is the opposite process, causing a nucleus to split into two smaller nuclei—usually through radioactive decay. The nucleus can also be modified through bombardment by high energy subatomic particles or photons. If this modifies the number of protons in a nucleus, the atom changes to a different chemical element. [47] [48]
The two discovering parties independently assign the discovered meson two different symbols, J and ψ; thus, it becomes formally known as the J/ψ meson. The discovery finally convinces the physics community of the quark model's validity. 1974 Robert J. Buenker and Sigrid D. Peyerimhoff introduce the multireference configuration interaction method.