ABSTRACT
Spontaneous fission was discovered by Petrjak and Flerov, 1 year after the thermal neutroninduced fission (Hahn and Strassmann), confirming the predictions1 made by Bohr and Wheeler in 1939. As early as in 1928, Gamow and, independently, Condon and Gurney have explained a-decay as a quantum mechanical tunneling through the Coulomb barrier. The similarity between the two processes was recognized from the beginning.1 , 2 Nevertheless, the theories of these phenomena were developed on different grounds.Nuclear reaction microscopic methods (in particular R-matrix theory) have been used in α-decay,3 4 but for many years the phenomenological liquid drop model dominated the fission.
