Há 100 anos, a física austríaca Lise Meitner (1878–1968) descobriu um efeito amplamente utilizado na atualidade para analisar superfícies e estudar a dinâmica da dissociação de moléculas isoladas, o Efeito Auger, estudado em disciplinas avançadas na graduação em Física. Neste trabalho, revisaremos alguns aspectos da história de Lise Meitner e da física do efeito, que até hoje leva o nome do físico francês Pierre Auger (1899–1993), que descobriu o mesmo fenômeno cerca de dois anos depois. Assim como outros pesquisadores, endossamos a importância de renomear este efeito e reconhecer as contribuições de ambos os cientistas.

One hundred years ago, the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) discovered an effect, which is largely used nowadays for surfaces analysis and studies related to dissociation dynamics of isolated molecules, the Auger effect, studied in advanced undergraduate physics courses. In this article, we review some aspects of Lise Meitner’s story and the physics of the effect that still has the male scientist’s name, Pierre Auger (1899–1993), who independently discovered the same phenomenon around two years later. Like other researchers, we endorse the importance of renaming this effect and recognizing both scientists’ contributions.

A new approach to evaluate nuclear photofissilities at incident photon energies above the pion photoproduction threshold has been recently developed and proved to describe successfully the fissilities of natPb and 232Th target nuclei at energies ~0.2-4.0 GeV. The method is merely a simple, semiempirical description of the photofission reactions in which fissility, f, is governed by two basic quantities, namely, i) the first-chance fission probability, $\bar{f}_1$, for the average cascade residual, and ii) the slope, $\bar{s}$, of the chance-fission probability associated with the average evaporative sequence of fissionable residuals. In the present work we have extended this approach to analyse photofissity data that have been accumulated over the past fourty years or so, measured at 1 GeV, for nearly fourty target nuclei extending from Ti up to Np. Results have shown that the variation of fissility with Z²/A could be described quite satisfactorily by the proposed model.