Burton Richter

Origins and early life

Burton Richter was born in New York on 22 March 1931 and was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, then in Far Rockaway in Queens; his father Abraham was a textile worker and his mother was Fanny Pollack. He went to Far Rockaway High School, which also sent Richard Feynman and Baruch Blumberg on to Nobel prizes, then to Mercersburg Academy, then to MIT, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his doctorate in 1956.

Work and career

He joined the Stanford faculty and stayed for the rest of his life, becoming a full professor in 1967. With his colleague David Ritson he designed SPEAR, a ring in which electrons and their antimatter twins were made to circle in opposite directions and collide head-on, and he fought for years to have it built. In November 1974 his team found that at one precise energy the collisions produced something far too abundant and far too long-lived to be ordinary: a heavy new particle, which he named psi.

Samuel Ting's group at Brookhaven had found the same thing by a wholly different route and called it J, and the two announcements on the same day gave physics the J/psi meson and the episode remembered as the November Revolution — proof of a fourth quark, charm, and with it of the quark model itself. Richter and Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Later years

He directed the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from 1984 to 1999, spent his later years arguing publicly for nuclear power and for federal science funding, received the Enrico Fermi Award and the National Medal of Science, and died at Stanford on 18 July 2018 at the age of eighty-seven.