Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his leadership of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, news.berkeley.edu reported. They have almost no mass, and no electrical charge.
At the award presentation on Tuesday at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Nobel committee chair Mark Pearce stated that Halzen had led an international team of researchers and engineers to provide a fantastic instrument, and that his tenacity and scientific vision paved the way for a new kind of astronomy. Halzen, 82, told the Nobel news conference by phone from Italy that winning was a great surprise and a great pleasure, noting that when the project started, very few thought it would work. So this was kind of an adventure where success wasn’t guaranteed.
Halzen Plans Neutrino Detector in Antarctic Ice
In the late 1980s, Halzen first presented plans and ideas for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole, envisioning a vast network of sensors in Antarctic ice. And that’s always kind of fun.
It was a cool project.
AMANDA was completed in 2000 but did not manage to detect the high-energy neutrinos Halzen was looking for.
Building the Instrument
Convincing donors of the soundness of the idea was no simple matter. Nevertheless, the National Science Foundation provided support. IceCube harnesses a key property of neutrinos: that they produce a flash of light when colliding with an atomic nucleus, which can be tracked by sensors embedded in clear, glacial ice.
Using IceCube, researchers can capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe, providing information to better understand distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes, and other cosmic phenomena. Halzen noted that the project’s success involved some luck and that it was difficult to imagine pulling it off anywhere other than at UW–Madison. This is a celebration of a very unusual project.
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