Professional Interests

I started my research activities in Nuclear Physics. Initially my work was done making use of a Tandem Van der Graff (5 MeV/A) accelerator from the University of São Paulo and a Enge split pole magnetic spectrograph. After few years though, I was working with higher energy beams (20 MeV/A) but still in nuclear ( or unclear ? ) physics. Learned more about nuclear structure and nuclear chemistry. Then the energy went relativistic (14.6 GeV/A)! Why not? New and exciting subject, I tought. It is fun physics but life goes on. So today I play with bigger toys and no nuclear physics but particle physics. New stuff!

• Spectroscopy in the A=100 region. For my master thesis, I studied the reaction 110Cd(3He,d)111In. The one particle transfer reaction permits the investigation of 1p+core states in 111In. Believe or not the experiment was done using emulsion plates as detectors.
• Elastic Transfer. The elastic transfer was a big thing and neat subject in the 70's-80's. In the elastic scattering channel two ions can exchange one particle and you wouldn't be able to tell what happened. But, the interference between the scatering amplitudes can be appreciable. That's the type of study that I did for my PhD thesis, except the system was quite a bit complex: 10B + 14N. If you never tought about 10B and 14N, just look up in any nuclear data table the ground state spins of these objects and lets talk interference....
• Detectors In my free time between the MSc and PhD I had enough time to learn how to build gas filled position sensitive detectors for the detection of low energy heavy ions and X-ray (on the side). I actually used them to collect data. There is a lot to be said about building particle detectors. First it is an art. Second you learn more than you asked for. In the process of building these devices I got really hooked into electronics, computers and data acquisition systems. I am still hooked.
• High Spin States When time came for a Post-Doc I had the opportunity to join Jurg Saladin's group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Pittsburgh. There the main subject of research was the high spin spectroscopy in the A=70-80 region. Our main interest was isotopes of Krypton from A=74 to 78. When we were studying these objects we made use of the Pittsburgh Multi Element Germanium Detector Array. In the array we had 6 high purity compton supressed germanium detectors and 14 BGO crystals for multiplicity filter.
• Deep Inelastic Scattering As a side project when in Pittsburgh, we decide to investigate the usefulness of deep inelastic scattering reactions to populate high spin states in neutron rich isotopes near A=170. It was exciting to do something that wasn't done before even though the final results were not all that clear.
• Relativistic Heavy Ions. Then it came, the stuff that no-one had done it before. Relativistic heavy ions. I got involved in two aspects of the E814 experiment. First, even though the main subject of RHI is central collisions and the search for QGP, we investigated the peripheral collisions and the electromagnetic phenomena. When heavy ions collide at relativistic velocities the electric field contracts and can excite the nucleus to the Giant Dipole resonance. The question of the excitation of the Double Giant Dipole was very much in alive and still is. With lots of work we could reconstruct the excitation energy of the GDR, via the detection of its decay products, with 1-2MeV resolution! But, I was also working in the Trigger of the experiment. That's where I really got involved with trigger systems, data acquisition and computers, my old vice.

• R&D of accordion liquid argon and krypton calorimeters. This is really fun stuff. Accordion calorimeters are cool devices. Here most of the work goes into the understanding of signal processing. We worry about preamplifiers, shapers, and digitizers.

• ATLAS at CERN. The future seems to be in the LHC. It is the only place today where we can search for the Higgs boson and new physics in a large scale. But everything has a price. It may take 10 years from today (1995) for us to see anything happening.

Not everything goes as well as one can wish. Some experiments don't fly for one or other reason. Here are three of them which had promising future but didn't go very far....

• OASIS - Open Axially Symetric Ion Spectrometer was a proposal submitted for RHIC in the form of an letter of intent.
• GEM - Gamma Electron Muons, was a large detector that was proposed for the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) in Waxahatchie, Texas. The experiment was aproved, but the SSC had a different ending.
• E889 - Search for neutrino oscillation - A very nice ideia, and great concept. Except no money for it. Too bad.