Department of Physics at the U of I

Professor Deborah Errede received her PhD. from the University of Michigan in 1987 in experimental high energy physics on the PEP electron-positron storage ring at SLAC based on a study of higher generation massive neutrinos. Her undergraduate work was done at the University of Colorado with a Universities Research Association scholarship and where she also worked at the UC Cyclotron. After working as a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Wisconsin she came to the University of Illinois in 1991 where she is now a research associate professor.

Professor Errede developed front-end electronics for the CDF muon system, was an electroweak physics convener for that experiment, and was part of a team measuring the properties of W-ã production, in the 1990’s. The CDF collaboration is primarily known for the discovery of the top quark.

From 2000-2004 Professor Errede was a principal investigator on a grant dedicated to research in advanced accelerator techniques. Simulation studies of different types of muon cooling systems, experimental research of muon ionization cooling energy absorbers, and partial support for a PhD. student involved in SCRF research at Argonne Laboratory was funded. The Muon Test Area, a test beam facility at Fermilab, is a result of the research associated with this effort in conjunction with the Illinois Consortium for Accelerator Research. She also co-taught a new graduate course “Accelerators: Theory and Applications” in both summer of 1999 and 2007.

Current research is focused on electroweak symmetry breaking through the Higgs mechanism amongst other physics topics at the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.