Burton 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.