The Belgian-American scientist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work creating an Antarctic observatory of ice to detect high-energy neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that can reveal otherwise inaccessible information about the cosmos.
Halzen, 82, realised that pristine ice at the South Pole could be used to track such neutrinos, sometimes known as ‘ghost particles’ for the way they pass through the Earth without a trace, only interacting with matter extremely rarely.
“The messengers bring information from the cosmos,” Eva Olsson, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a Press conference. “They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars.”
Halzen said at a Press conference: “It’s a great relief for me because this was not totally unexpected, and around this time of the year I always felt miserable because I didn’t win the prize and thought it was terrible for my collaborators who deserved it so much.”
“So that problem is finally solved.”
The interactions registered by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory provide information about how high-energy particles are created and may even reveal previously unknown phenomena, the Academy said.
“We could catch them in ice, that was the goal,” Halzen said of the years-long effort to construct the observatory, which he described as opening ‘a window on the universe.’
In 2014, the US-based Smithsonian magazine dubbed Halzen ‘Neutrino Man’ when giving him one of its Ingenuity Awards, acclaiming him for an ‘amazing experiment (that) heralds the beginning of a new era in astronomy.’
It even published a comic illustrating his life: “How One Physicist’s Pursuit of the Cosmos Took Off in Antarctica”.
The observatory – in effect a telescope that shows neutrinos instead of light – is set in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, which extends to a depth of 2,500 metres below the surface near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
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