From 1 November 2008 to 31 October 2012 he was director of the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*) in Trento, Italy.
After his application to study physics at the technical university in Dresden, he was rejected five times on political and ideological grounds, he escaped from East Germany in 1959, via West Berlin.
In 1967 he was awarded a doctorate by professor Wolfgang Gentner at the Max-Planck-Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg.
Richter and his staff members achieved significant research results with the development of the superconducting electron accelerators in Darmstadt S-DALINAC, which was the first accelerator of this kind in Europe, and furthermore the design and setup of the first free electron Laser (FEL) in Germany.
There are researches about symmetries and conservation laws in light nuclei and phenomena of fluctuations in nuclear reactions, experiments for the electromagnetic suspenses of nuclei with photons, electrons and hadrons as well as works on the area of channeling radiation, non-linear dynamics and quantum chaos.