Explorers

Dr. Burton Richter


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Dr. Burton Richter is the Director Emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. He was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn and raised in the Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway. Richter earned both his bachelor's degree and his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a professor at Stanford University, he built a particle accelerator called SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he call a psi. A team led by Samuel Ting at Brookhaven National Laboratory also made this discovery, but he called the particle J. The particle became know as the psi-J meson. This discovery (made on November 11, 1974) was part of the "November Revolution" of particle physics. The importance of this discovery is highlighted by the subsequent, rapid changes in high-energy physics at the time. Burton Richter and Samuel Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. From 1984 to 1999, Burton Richter was the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, operated by Stanford University. The facility is located on 426 acres of Stanford-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, and employs over 10,000 people. The main accelerator is two miles long, the longest linear accelerator in the world. This podcast was recorded at the 1987 Achievement Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona and Burton Richter addressed the Academy student delegates about his life-long passion for particle physics.
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ExplorersBy Academy of Achievement