Burton Richter (redirected from Burt richter)

Richter, Burton 

Born Mar. 22, 1931, in New York. American physicist.

Richter graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1952. In 1956 he became a research associate at Stanford University’s high-energy physics laboratory; he was named a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1967.

Richter’s principal works deal with particle physics. In 1974, in experiments using colliding electron-positron beams, he discovered the ψ-meson (J-meson), the first particle of a new family of mesons with a fourth (charmed) quark. He also discovered the ψ-meson and meson resonances with masses of 2.8–3.6 gigaelec-tron volts.

For his discovery of the ψ-meson, Richter received a Nobel Prize in 1976.