NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profile - Burton Richter
Posted by John Hunter | Under NSF Fellows Friday Aug 17, 2007We have posted a new profile of a past NSF Graduate Research Fellow: Burton Richter, 1976 Nobel Laurette in Physics.
“Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.” Autobiography on Nobel site
Burton Richter was born in New York City and attended undergraduate and graduate studies at MIT. There, he earned a B.S. and, with the support of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1952-1953), a Ph.D.. Early on in his research at MIT’s magnet laboratory, his interest in nuclear and particle physics and in an accelerator that he had used in his experiments became apparent. That revelation led him in his studies to a program in which “not only did [he] have to design and build the apparatus required for [his] experiments, but …also had to help maintain and operate [an] accelerator.”
In 1957, he began what became a six-year project to build the first colliding-beam device—the ancestor to all modern high-energy physics accelerators. Soon, his vision enlarged further, dreaming of a high-energy electron-positron colliding-beam machine and its uses.
When invited to a position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1963, Richter led a team that immediately began work on the design of a high-energy electron-positron machine (later called SPEAR). Following the construction of both the machine and a large magnetic detector, experiments began in 1973. The results were as exciting and revealing as Richter had hoped.
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