Hertzog Wins Guggenheim

David W. Hertzog
awarded
2004-05 John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship

Professor of Physics David W. Hertzog has received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2004–05 academic year. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to their son. The Foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions. The Fellowships are awarded to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Professor Hertzog will use his Guggenheim for extended, focused research on two high-profile projects in precision electroweak physics:

A determination of the Fermi constant, G_F, (the weak interaction strength) by a measurement of the muon lifetime to a precision of 1 ppm, a 20-fold improvement compared to previous efforts. Hertzog is the co-spokesman and initiator of the mLAN project at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland. He is pictured above looking through the exterior shell of the mLAN detector, which was designed and fabricated at Illinois before being shipped to Switzerland last fall.

Development of a new proposal to reduce the uncertainty on the muon anomalous magnetic moment measurement by a factor of 4. The goal of these studies will be to extend the reach of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) experiment E821, the groundbreaking g–2 experiment, by em-ploying a suite of modest upgrades. The improvements will be aimed at increasing the data rate; the current configuration would require an unacceptably long run to increase the statistics. Hertzog has been a central collaborator on E821 and expects to take on a greater leadership role in the future effort.

Department of Physics | College of Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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