Burton Richter, Physicist Winner of a Nobel and Influential Award in Washington, DC, Dies | Science

Burton Richter, a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist who also exerted a significant influence in science policy, died on July 18 , the laboratory announced yesterday. He was 87 years old. In 1974, Richter's key scientific discovery laid a cornerstone for the standard model of particle physicists and fundamental forces. Later, he played an important role in US science policy, including a restructuring of the Ministry of Energy that elevated his scientific efforts

"The thing about Burt is that it's a good thing. he never went out and said, "says Michael Lubell, physicist at City College New York and former lobbyist at the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington, DC" He was pleased with the result "

Richter gained almost instant scientific renown In 1974, while he and his team at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) in Menlo Park, California, broke up high electrons energy and positrons to produce a new particle that they have dubbed the La. The discovery was key because the & s turned out to be made of a particle called the quark of charm and its partner. Antimatter. moment, a team from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, discovered the same particle they called J. The particle is still called J / ψ.

The discovery greatly expanded scientists' understanding of particles called quarks, which had been discovered at SLAC only a few years earlier. Physicists knew that two more familiar particles – protons and neutrons – were made up of quark trios. Two types of quarks, up quarks and down quarks, combine to produce protons and neutrons. The researchers also experienced a third type, the strange quark. The discovery of ψ confirms the prediction of a fourth type of quark. But even more importantly, this has helped to establish a particular theory, known as the GIM mechanism, about how different types of quarks come in pairs and how they interact through the so-called weak nuclear force. Until then, the ideas on what were the quarks and how they behaved were all over the map, says Gordon Kane, a theoretician from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "It's the importance of J / ψ," he says. "You went from n ideas, mostly half-cooked, to an idea, the good one."

The results of SLAC and Brookhaven were confirmed simultaneously. "It was a revolutionary moment, everyone was excited," says Sheldon Glashow, a theorist from Boston University and one of the inventors of the GIM mechanism. For the J / ψ discovery, Richter and Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976. Physicists now know that there are six types of quarks in three pairs that interact as predicted the GIM mechanism. 19659005] In addition to his signature discovery, Richter was renowned for his expertise in building particle accelerators. He designed the Stanford Positon-Electron Accelerator Ring (SPEAR), the collider his team used to discover the J / ψ. Richter was also very open to ideas from other fields, says Arthur Bienenstock, a retired solid state physicist from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. For example, he says, Richter was open to the simultaneous use of X-rays generated by SPEAR to do experiments in solid-state physics and materials science. SPEAR will eventually become an X-ray source known as the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), the world's first synchrotron radiation facility for users of the wider scientific community, which Bienenstock will run from 1978 to 1997. [19659005] Richter's interest extends to nuclear energy, energy technology and climate change. Policy makers in Washington, DC, have taken his advice seriously, says Lubell. For example, when Lubell was at APS, he and Richter urged Congress and the White House to reorganize the Ministry of Energy to create an undersecretary for science instead of having only one. a single under-secretary for the entire department. The effort peaked in 2005, remembers Lubell, when he and Richter went to see the then Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman. "Bodman listened carefully and said," You're right, we're going to do it that way, "says Lubell.In 2005, Congress passed a law that established the position.

Richter was also there. one of the few scientists who helped the Obama administration in 2008 to identify "ready-to-go" research projects in scientific disciplines it would fund from the economic stimulus package called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Congress approved in 2009 to improve the sudden collapse of the economy.

Richter was tough, but still friendly and principled, others say. Bienenstock recalls that he and Richter regularly clashed to share the SLAC signature linac to feed the SSRL, which was originally an independent national laboratory, and the SLAC particle physics experiments, but when both labs were offic ially merged, in 1992, Bienenstock said, Richter was fully supportive of SSRL and both became good friends. "He was gracious in a deep way," says Bienenstock.

Glashow agrees. In 2016, he taught a course for a dozen freshmen on energy issues and climate change and decided to award Richter's book in 2010 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century . When Glashow told Richter, Richter sent him 12 copies of the book, personally registered to each student.