While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.

With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he called a ψ (psi). In May 2007 he visited Iran and Sharif University of Technology. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle physics. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974 alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting.