Burton Richter

Today is the birthday of particle physicist Burton Richter, born in 1931 in Brooklyn, NY. While attending MIT as an undergraduate, he became interested in electrons and their antimatter counterparts known as positrons. After years of efforts Richter’s brainchild, a particle accelerator called the Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring, started colliding electrons and positrons in 1973. It didn’t take long for the experiment to bear fruit. On November 11, 1974, Richter announced that his team had discovered a new particle called psi; a team led by MIT physicist Sam Ting had independently discovered the same particle, which they called J. In 1976, Richter and Ting shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the J/psi particle, which proved the existence of a fourth quark, the charm. The discovery sparked the “November revolution,” in which physicists fully recognized the importance of quarks (we now know there are six) and integrated them into the Standard Model that describes nature’s particles and forces.

Date in History: 22 March 1931