Burton Richter (born March 22 1931) is a Nobel Prize-winning United States physicist. A native of New York City, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1956. He was director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1984 to 1999. As a professor at Stanford University, Richter built a particle accelerator called SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the help of David Ritson and the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he discovered a new subatomic particle he called a psi particle (now called a J/ψ particle). The same discovery was made independently by Samuel Ting and the two scientists were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

                       

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