Harvard University Department of Physics

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.