Hi,

I am a 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 rockets, and instrumentation for the detection of Ultra-High Energy neutrinos.

Here is a summary of my current research:

  • OGRE - The Off-plane Grating Rocket experiment is a sounding rocket payload designed to obtain the highest-resolution soft X-ray spectrum of the star Capella to date. The mission aims to flight test the Off-Plane Grating Spectrometer instrument concept for use on future X-ray missions. I lead the mission engineering.

  • PBR - POEMMA-Balloon with Radio is a Super Pressure Balloon. Its primary scientific goal is to observe the fluorescence emission of Extensive Air Showers produced by Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays from sub-orbital altitudes, validating detection strategies for space missions. Secondary objectives include searching for macroscopic dark matter and detecting astrophysical tau neutrinos via the earth-skimming technique using both optical and radio methods. I am Project Manager for the radio instrument.

  • RNO-G - The Radio Neutrino Observatory, Greenland, is the first in-ice radio array in the Northern Hemisphere, designed to detect ultra-high energy neutrinos via coherent radio emission from particle cascades within the ice. I am a science team member and have worked as a driller at Summit Station.

  • HERON - The Hybrid Elevated Radio Observatory for Neutrinos will search for transient neutrino bursts from violent astrophysical sources like gamma-ray bursts and binary neutron star mergers, integrating data into the global multi-messenger astronomy network. I am Project Manager for the Phased Array and lead antenna construction.

  • Optical Blocking Filters - Environmental testing of large format optical blocking filters made from SiC grids. These grids are designed to provide optical blocking and contamination control for the focal planes on future Probes or Flagships.

  • X-ray grating developments - The manufacture and testing of state-of-the-art X-ray reflection grating technology designed for use on a future Probe or Flagship.

I lead the Space Instrumentation Group at Penn State University, which has flown 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.  For tREXS, I built what is believed to be the largest X-ray focal plane ever flown in space. I oversee the group's NASA-funded programs, run the lab used to build our payloads, and mentor a team of graduate students, engineers and undergraduate researchers. I also manage the department's rooftop telescopes, and I founded the STAR undergraduate research program.

I also work in the Wissel Group whose focus is on ultra-high energy neutrino detection.

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. 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. I returned to Summit Station in 2026. Read my 2024 Greenland blog and my 2026 Greenland blog.

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 (10¹⁸ 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.

I have varying levels of experience using the following facilities:

I also have collaborations with colleagues at the University of Osaka (Japan) where I worked on an X-ray imaging system for the space mission ASTRO-H (Hitomi -  launched in 2016) .

Anything that is in bold on this website is a link - have a click around.  If any of the links are broken, please let me know!

Contact

dr (dot) james (dot) tutt (at) gmail (dot) com