Burton Richter
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”.