As a professor at Stanford, Richter designed the SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) particle accelerator with the help of another Stanford physics professor, David Ritson. When eventually resources were secured, Richter led the building of SPEAR, with the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he called a ψ (psi). This discovery was also made by the team led by Samuel Ting at Brookhaven National Laboratory, but he called the particle J. The particle thus became known as the J/ψ meson. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.