Burton Richter

Facts

Burton Richter

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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MLA style: Burton Richter – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sun. 10 Dec 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1976/richter/facts/>

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