Richter, Burton (1931-2018), an American physicist, was the joint winner, with American physicist Samuel Chao Chung Ting, of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976. Together they discovered an elementary nuclear particle called the psi particle, or J particle. See Psi particle .
Richter’s early experiments involved the structure of isotopes (unstable forms) of mercury. His work focused on the problem of creating the short-lived mercury-197 isotope by bombarding gold with a beam of deuterons, the nuclei of deuterium atoms. He completed a thesis on the production of pi-mesons (a type of atomic particle) from hydrogen.
In the mid-1960’s, Richter set up a group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to design a high-energy machine that would force a beam of electrons to collide with a beam of positrons, enabling scientists to study the structure of the two particles. Experiments with this machine, called the Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR), began in 1973. The psi particle was discovered using SPEAR in 1974.
Burton Richter was born on March 22, 1931, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, graduating in 1952, and became a research associate and professor at Stanford University in California. He became director of SLAC in 1984. Richter died on July 18, 2018.
See also Antimatter ; Physics (Advances in the mid-1900’s) ; Ting, Samuel Chao Chung .
