Burton Richter

Burton Richter was born March 22, 1931, and built his career at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where precision and enormous energies met. In 1974 his SLAC team, working in parallel with Samuel Ting's group at Brookhaven, discovered the J/ψ meson — a finding so jarring it triggered what physicists now call the November Revolution, the moment the quark model snapped into experimental focus. The Nobel Prize followed in 1976. Richter went on to lead SLAC itself from 1984 to 1999, steering the lab through a decade and a half of frontier work. He died July 18, 2018.