Burton Richter
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Burton Richter
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1976
Born: 22 March 1931, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Died: 18 July 2018, Stanford, CA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
By about 1970, a large number of elementary particles had been identified. Most of these comprised two or three quarks. Using high-energy particle collisions and independently of one another, in 1974 both Burton Richter and Samuel Ting, independently of each other, discovered a new heavy particle, known as J/psi, proving experimentally the existence of a fourth quark, later named “charm”.
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