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Incoming links: Burton Richter
Burton Richter Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Burton Richter coauthored an independent 1974 discovery of a narrow resonance in electron–positron annihilation. Scanning the collision energy revealed a sharp increase in production of hadrons and charged-lepton pairs near 3.1 GeV. Unlike reconstructing a decay from a fixed-target beam, this method varied the initial energy to pass directly through the resonance. The complementary measurements helped establish the state now associated with the November 1974 particle discoveries.[ref]
Discovery of a Narrow Resonance in e+e- Annihilation by J.-E. Augustin. 1974 abstract: sharp cross-section peak and measured width limit
Portrait of Burton Richter
. Eddie Adams / Associated Press; 29 November 1976; existing Commons version uploaded by Based5290. Public domain in the United States: publication without copyright notice (PD-US-no-notice). Source usage terms, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 2026-10-18
Awarded in equal shares to Burton Richter and Samuel Chao Chung Ting for pioneering work discovering a new kind of heavy elementary particle.[ref]
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1976 by Nobel Prize Outreach. Individual official summary: equal halves for pioneering discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind.
In 1974, Samuel Chao Chung Ting's Brookhaven team and Burton Richter's SPEAR team independently found the narrow state now called the J/psi meson. Each discovery paper notes learning of the other result during manuscript preparation.[ref]
Experimental Observation of a Heavy Particle J by J. J. Aubert. Aubert and others, p. 1406, note 5: independent SPEAR result
[ref]Discovery of a Narrow Resonance in e+e- Annihilation by J.-E. Augustin. Augustin and others, p. 1408, note 3: independent Brookhaven result
The common question was whether the observed excess represented a new particle resonance, rather than a peculiarity of particle identification, acceptance or calibration. The important difference was the horizontal coordinate of the search: Brookhaven reconstructed a final-state invariant mass; SPEAR scanned an initial-state center-of-mass energy. The invariant-mass selection of bubble-chamber events uses the first kind of reasoning, despite a very different recording medium.