Physics Department Faculty:
Joao Guimaraes da Costa
Assistant Professor of PhysicsPhD 2000, University of Michigan
Joao Guimaraes da Costa is an experimental physicist engaged
in high energy elementary particle physics research at energy
frontier colliders. His main research interest is the search
for new physics phenomena beyond the experimentally well
established Standard Model. He works at both the Collider
Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment in Chicago and
the ATLAS experiment
in Geneva, Switzerland.
Professor Guimaraes interests at the CDF, an experiment that
studies proton and anti-proton collisions at the Tevatron
Collider, are studies of the top quark and searches forthe
Higgs boson. The top quark, discovered at CDF in 1995, is
an unique probe for possible new physics at high energies,
while the discovery of the Higgs boson would shine light
into the origins of mass and the electroweak symmetry breaking
process.
The high-energy frontier will soon shift to the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC), a proton-proton collider at CERN. Professor
Guimaraes is working at the ATLAS experiment where he is
contributing to the muon spectrometer construction. The ATLAS
experiment has an enormous potential for new discoveries
ranging from new particles like the Higgs boson or dark matter
candidates, to exotic new phenomena like large extra dimensions
or small black holes. The next few years promise to be an
uniquely exciting time in the history of particle physics,
and all starts in late 2007 when the ATLAS experiment will
record the first collisions.