What roles did Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch play in explaining nuclear fission?

Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch played a pivotal role in the theoretical understanding of nuclear fission. After Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann experimentally demonstrated that bombarding uranium with neutrons produced barium, they shared their findings with Meitner, who had recently fled Nazi Germany for Sweden.123

Working with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner provided the essential physical interpretation of these results. They invoked the liquid-drop model of the nucleus to explain how a heavy nucleus could be distorted and split into two lighter fragments of approximately equal size. Furthermore, they recognized the enormous energy potential released during this process.4312

In January 1939, Meitner and Frisch proposed the term "fission" to describe this phenomenon, a name Frisch elicited from the American biophysicist William Arnold due to the process's similarity to biological cell division. Their theoretical work provided the necessary framework for the scientific community to understand the reaction, which subsequently led to intense global research into nuclear energy and chain reactions.2531