Richter, Burton

Richter, Burton (rĭk`tər), 1931–, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956. A professor at Stanford Univ., Richter built a particle accelerator (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the help of David Ritson and the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he discovered a new subatomic particle called a psi-particle (now called a J-particle). The same discovery was made independently by Samuel Ting. The two scientists were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

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Richter, Burton (1931–  ) physicist; born in New York City. Joining Stanford in 1956, he became director of its Linear Accelerator Center (1984). He received the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics (shared with simultaneous and independent codiscoverer S. C. C. Ting) for his discovery of the J/psi hadron, a new heavy elementary particle that provided experimental evidence for the existence of charmed quarks.

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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.