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Burton Richter (born March 22, 1931 in New York City , New York - † July 18, 2018 in Palo Alto , California ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner. He was active in both elementary particle and accelerator physics.

Life

Burton Richter studied physics from 1948 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Bachelor's degree 1952), including with Francis Bitter in the magnetism laboratory. But he soon switched to particle physics and received his doctorate in 1956 with L. S. Osborne on the photoproduction of pions on protons. From 1956 he was at the HEPL (High Energy Physics Laboratory) in Stanford. In 1957 he tested the validity of quantum electrodynamics (QED) up to distances of with experiments at Stanford University . Soon after, he was part of the Gerard Kitchen O'Neill team and designed the first electron collider at HEPL. This enabled them to extend the tests of the validity limit of the QED again to ten times smaller intervals in 1965. At the same time, at the invitation of Wolfgang Panofsky, from 1963 at the SLAC he was involved in the planning of an electron-positron storage ring, the later SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Accelerator Ring) and also developed various detectors. In 1970 the construction of SPEAR began and in 1973 the first experiments took place (after only 27 months at a cost of 6 million dollars). In 1960 he became an Assistant Professor, 1963 Associate Professor and 1967 Professor at Stanford.

In 1976 Richter and Samuel CC Ting received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for leading achievements in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind", a bound state of the charm quark with its antiparticle ( J / ψ meson ), which in 1974 gave them direct evidence of the charm quark succeeded (November Revolution). The discovery was made on November 10, 1974, a Sunday, and the very next day he notified Samuel Ting of Brookhaven National Laboratory , who told him that he had independently made the same discovery. Richter called it ψ, Ting J, later it was called J / ψ. The experiment also confirmed the GIM mechanism and was of great support to the Standard Model .

During a stay at CERN in 1975/76, during which he experimented on the proton storage ring ISR, he undertook scaling studies for electron-positron storage rings, which served as a preliminary stage to the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN in the 1980s.

From 1982 to 1984 he was Technical Director at SLAC and then Director until 1999. During this time he also supported the construction of a synchrotron radiation source , the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) (headed by Arthur Bienenstock ), which was used, for example, for solid-state physics. Although there were occasional conflicts over the usage times of the SLAC storage ring (with Richter on the side of the elementary particle physicists), this subsided after the 1992 merger of SLAC and SSRL. He oversaw the construction of the Stanford Linear Collider and, in the 1990s, developed plans for the further development of the SLAC including the Linac Coherent Light Source .

He later dealt with energy issues and climate change and published a book about it in 2010. In it he also spoke out in favor of the use of nuclear energy. Richter was on the DOE's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Energy and chaired the Subcommittee on Fuel Cycle from 2000 to 2013. He was a member of the first US PCAST ​​Review Panel for assessing climate change. Richter was an influential science advisor in Washington. With the President of the American Physical Society, he managed to get the post of Undersecretary of State for Science to be established in the Department of Energy (before that there was only one for Energy), and in 2008 he advised the Obama administration on identifying science projects directly related to a budget of $ 20 billion as part of the economic recovery program after the financial crisis.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989, and the American Philosophical Society in 2003 , and was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1994 he was President of the American Physical Society . He received the National Medal of Science (2014), the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize (1976) and the Enrico Fermi Prize of the DOE (2012). In 2007 he was awarded the AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his services on energy and climate change .

He had been married to Laurose Richter since 1960 and had a son and a daughter.

Fonts (selection)

  • Beyond Smoke and Mirrors. Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century . Cambridge University Press, 2010 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).

literature

  • Adrian Cho: Burton Richter, Nobel Prize – winning physicist with influence in Washington, DC, dies . In: Science . July 20, 2018 ( sciencemag.org [accessed September 3, 2018]).
  • Helen Quinn: Burton Richter (1931-2018) . In: Nature . tape 560 , no. 7720 , August 2018, ISSN  0028-0836 , p. 554–554 , doi : 10.1038 / d41586-018-06036-6 ( nature.com [accessed September 3, 2018]).

Web links

Commons : Burton Richter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter dies at 87. In: stanford.edu. July 19, 2018, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  2. ^ Burton Richter - Author Profile. In: inspirehep.net . Retrieved June 10, 2020 .