James Tutt

I am an Associate Research Professor based at The Pennsylvania State University, (University Park, PA, USA) in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. I am an Experimental Astro-Particle physicist who specializes in the development of instrumentation for high resolution soft X-ray spectroscopy on suborbital rocket, and instrumentation for the detection of Ultra-High Energy neutrinos.

I work with a group at the Penn State University, run by professor Randall McEntaffer, that has built on several sub-orbital rocket missions (WRXR, TREXS) and is currently working on OGRE. The payloads of these missions are designed to test the effectiveness of off-plane gratings in a high resolution soft X-ray spectrometer and show that such instruments could improve understanding of shock fronts in supernova remnants and find the WHIM. My primary responsibility is to oversee the specification, design, fabrication, testing and launch of the X-ray CCD camera intended for the mission. In addition I assist in the integration and testing of the rocket spectrometer optics. I run all of the lab space used for the build of the rocket payloads and supervise and mentor a small team of undergraduates.

I am part of the Radio Neutrino Observatory - Greenland collaboration. The goal of this research is to build an array of radio detectors at Summit Station on Greenland’s ice sheet. The instrument is intended to detect Askaryan emission from ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos above 10 PeV. The detector is proposed to have 35 stations of which 7 have been installed so far. Each station consists of 3 strings carrying dipole antennas embedded up to 100 meters in ice. These antennas capture the horizontal and vertical polarization of the Askaryan signal and work in conjunction with surface antennas. The detector is designed to trigger on impulsive radio signals from neutrino-nucleon interactions in the ice. As part of the deployment of this instrument, I spent 5 weeks at Summit Station in 2024, performing experiments to improve the understanding of radio propagation in ice. Please check out the blog of my time in Greenland.

I also work on high altitude balloons that are designed for cosmic ray and neutrino detection. The first was the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) which was a next-generation NASA long-duration balloon-borne experiment designed to detect ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos with energies exceeding 1 EeV (10({}^{18}) eV). It is the successor to the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) mission, promising over an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity. The second is the POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) which is an advanced NASA suborbital stratospheric balloon mission designed to detect Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) and Very-High-Energy (VHE) neutrinos. It is scheduled for launch from Wanaka, New Zealand, in Spring 2027 and will utilize a Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) to circle the Southern Ocean for over 20 to 50 days, serving as a critical pathfinder for future space-based astrophysics missions.