Burton Richter opened his collider to X-ray science

Person

Burton Richter

Lived

1931–2018

Field

Particle physics

From

American

The story

Burton Richter was born in Brooklyn in 1931 into a Jewish family and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the son of a textile worker. After a doctorate at MIT he moved to Stanford, where he helped build one of the first colliding-beam machines, and in 1963 he joined the new Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC, to design an electron-positron collider. After years of struggle for funds, construction of SPEAR began in 1970.

Electrons racing around a ring give off intense X-rays, known as synchrotron radiation. For particle physicists it is an annoyance that drains energy from the beam. During SPEAR’s construction, two Stanford professors, Sebastian Doniach and William Spicer, came to Richter with a different view. Those X-rays, they argued, could be a million times more intense than anything an X-ray tube could produce, and with such beams it would be possible to do revolutionary experiments on materials. They asked him to build a port into the ring to let the light out.

Richter was convinced. As he wrote later, the world was simpler then than now, so he just did it, spending the extra money to add the port. In 1972 the first X-ray beamline was built as a hole in the wall of the ring. It became the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, the first of the modern synchrotron radiation facilities and the prototype for many more. Later, as director of SLAC from 1984 to 1999, Richter brought the synchrotron programme fully into the laboratory and began work on an X-ray free-electron laser.

Today the SPEAR ring is devoted entirely to X-ray science and serves about two thousand academic and industrial scientists. They use it in drug design, in studying the structures of biological molecules, in environmental clean-up, in electronics and in X-ray imaging, and synchrotron light sources around the world do the same. Richter, who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for co-discovering the charm quark with SPEAR, later said that one of a laboratory director’s most important jobs is to bring out the best ideas of the wider scientific community.

Why it matters

Richter’s decision helped launch the synchrotron light sources that thousands of scientists now use to design drugs, study molecules and develop new materials.

About Burton Richter

Accelerator builder who co-discovered the charm quark, opened his collider to X-ray science, led SLAC for 15 years, and spent his last decades pressing for clean energy to curb climate change.

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Burton Richter

1931–2018 · Particle physics

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Sources

• Burton Richter, Biographical NobelPrize.org
• Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource Wikipedia
• Burton Richter Wikipedia

Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.