Robert Kutschke
Scientist
Telephone: (630) 840-5645 E-mail: kutschke@fnal.gov Office Location: WH9W
Personal Web: http://home.fnal.gov/~kutschke/
Scientific Interest
Before coming to Fermilab I worked on the ARGUS experiment at DESY, in Hamburg Germany, and the CLEO experiment at Cornell University. At both of these experiments, which took place at electron-positron colliders, I did research into the spectroscopy of charmed hadrons and into the weak decays of hadrons containing b or c quarks. These experiments blazed the trail that lead to the extensive program of CP violation and rare decay studies performed by the BaBaR and Belle experiments since 1999.
I came to Fermilab in 1996 to continue this research at the FOCUS experiment, which was then just starting data taking, and at the BTeV experiment, which was early in its design phase. The FOCUS experiment was highly successful with 63 published results. The BTeV experiment held the promise of expanding the program of CP violation studies and rare decay physics far beyond the reach of previous experiments. In 2005 BTeV was cancelled by the Department of Energy, just before the anticipated start of construction. My colleagues and I have always considered the cancellation short sighted.
I next worked on the development of improved beam position monitors for the Tevatron and for the Main Injector. These projects led to significant operational improvements of the respective accelerators. Between 2006 and 2009 I worked on the design of the SiD Detector for the proposed International Linear Collider.
In September 2008 I turned my research interests towards a different corner of high energy physics, the Mu2e experiment, which will search for neutrino-less muon to electron conversion in the Coulomb field of an atomic nucleus. Although this experiment uses relatively low energy particle beams, its exquisite sensitivity to very, very rare processes provides access to mass scales far beyond the reach of even the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The design of the Mu2e experiment started from that of the MECO experiment, originally proposed for the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and has improved significantly over the past years. The Mu2e experiment was called out as a high priority by the 2007 P5 Panel and by the 2014 P5 panel. In July 2016 the US Department of Energy granted Mu2e full CD-3 approval, which approves the final design and authorizes the start of construction; the Mu2e schedule projects completion of construction and start of commissioning in early 2022 and first physics data in early 2024.