{"id":873883,"date":"2026-10-07T11:52:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T11:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873883\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T11:52:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T11:52:41","slug":"nobel-physics-prize-awarded-for-detection-of-cosmic-neutrinos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873883\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel physics prize awarded for detection of cosmic neutrinos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

Francis Halzen received the Nobel Prize in Physics on 6 October for his contributions to neutrino physics.Credit: Althea Dotzour\/University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison<\/p>\n

Belgian-born physicist Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on detecting high-energy elusive particles called neutrinos that come from deep space.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The most unusual portrait of the Milky Way yet: mapping the Galaxy with neutrinos<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

His pioneering contribution is the founding of a giant detector, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory<\/a> at the South Pole. Its results have helped to found the fields of neutrino and multimessenger astronomy, which enable physicists to unlock the mysteries of the Universe through observing highly energetic events from deep in the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Halzen, who is based at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, takes home the prize of 12 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million), announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 6 October. It is the first time since 1992 that the the physics prize has been awarded to only one winner.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a great surprise and I obviously didn\u2019t expect it,\u201d said Halzen, speaking to the Nobel press conference after the prize was announced. \u201cThis reflects on the really courageous people who joined me in this project when really no respectable conservative physicist would have joined me, but many talented people did and that\u2019s why I\u2019m here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Medicine Nobel awarded for brain \u2018switch\u2019 that controls neurons with light<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Neutrinos are the second most common particle in the Universe, after photons. More than one billion neutrinos pass through a human hand every second, but high-energy neutrinos are extremely rare and hard to detect. IceCube was designed to study the particles after they fly out of some of the most energetic environments in the Universe, such as supernovae and \u03b3-ray bursts. Because neutrinos pass straight through matter, they allow researchers to draw a straight line back to these events, providing them with a unique way of probing astrophysical phenomena. <\/p>\n

Halzen is \u201ca father figure for neutrino astronomy\u201d, says Paschal Coyle, a neutrino physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France and the former spokesperson of KM3NeT, a similarly large observatory being built in the Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole was Nobel prizewinner\u2019s Francis Halzen\u2019s brainchildCredit: Ilya Bodo, IceCube\/NSF<\/p>\n

Looking into the cosmos <\/p>\n

Despite being all around us, neutrinos are fiendishly difficult to detect because they are unaffected by magnetic fields and rarely ever interact with matter. In the 1980s, Halzen had the idea to use detectors attached to strings, lowered more than 1.5 kilometres into holes drilled into the clear ice of the Antarctic \u2014 which is free from many types of interference \u2014 to detect the rare and faint flashes of light when a fast-moving neutrino hits an atom. <\/p>\n

As long as the volume of the set-up was big enough, Halzen theorized that it could catch neutrinos and their path would reveal the direction from which they come, allowing researchers to trace their origins in the cosmos (see \u2018Neutrino observatory\u2019). <\/p>\n

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The IceCube Neutrino Observatory \u2014 an array of 5,160 sensors \u2014 was completed in 2010<\/a> at a cost of US$271 million, mainly funded by the US National Science Foundation. It now involves a collaboration of about 450 researchers. \u201cAfter one and a half decades of development, and another decade of construction, there was no guarantee we would ever see anything,\u201d Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube, told APS News last year. \u201cMany people thought we wouldn\u2019t, but we did.\u201d <\/p>\n

Within two years, the detector had observed energetic neutrinos from beyond the Milky Way. In 2013, the IceCube collaboration published a result1<\/a> showing that there was a population of neutrinos with energies so high that they could not have been produced anywhere in the Solar System. The finding helped to establish the new field of neutrino astronomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest risk we took is that nobody knew if the kilometre cube detector was actually large enough to detect neutrinos beyond our atmosphere from the Universe,\u201d Halzen told the Nobel press conference. \u201cBut it only took two years to detect that.\u201d . <\/p>\n

\u201cWe found evidence for neutrinos coming from supermassive black holes in other galaxies, and they shine so strongly that when you look at a neutrino sky you don\u2019t see the Milky Way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013 and 2014, IceCube discovered three neutrinos with energies that blew all others out of the water. Nicknamed Bert, Ernie and Big Bird<\/a>, they had energy levels measured in petaelectronvolts (a quadrillion electronvolts), thousands of times more energetic than those produced in Earth\u2019s most advanced particle colliders. And three years later, the collaboration made a long-awaited discovery of a high-energy neutrino that they could for the first time trace back to a specific source \u2014 a distant galaxy, called TXS 0506+056, often referred to as \u2018the Texas event\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

IceCube detectors are sunk deep into Antarctica\u2019s ice \u2014 which is free from many types of interference \u2014 to catch neutrinos at high energies. Credit: Yuya Makino, IceCube\/NSF<\/p>\n

Follow-up observations suggested that the source was a blazar, a violent galaxy with a variable brightness that harbours a supermassive black hole at its core. Seven studies from a suite of telescopes viewing the blazar using various methods described the galaxy in 2018. <\/p>\n

\u2018Undisputed force\u2019 <\/p>\n

Halzen was born in Tienen, Belgium, in 1944 and studied at the nation\u2019s University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve. He trained as a particle physicist, working at CERN, Europe\u2019s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, before moving to Wisconsin in 1971. <\/p>\n

As the principal investigator for IceCube from its original proposal in 1999, Halzen was the project\u2019s \u201cundisputed\u201d driving force, says IceCube senior member Elisa Resconi, an astroparticle physicist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. She says that Halzen deserves credit for having pushed for an experimental concept that many researchers initially saw as \u201cthe weirdest in the world\u201d. The logistical challenges of building a large-scale facility not just in Antarctica, but at the South Pole, were enormous. <\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Francis Halzen, a pioneer in neutrino physics, is announced as the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics. Credit: Christine OLSSON\/TT NEWS AGENCY\/AFP via Getty<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has such a charisma that when he enters a room, everyone turns around,\u201d Resconi says. He also takes special effort to cultivate talent \u2014 and can usually remember the names and academic histories of each member of the collaboration. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Francis Halzen received the Nobel Prize in Physics on 6 October for his contributions to neutrino physics.Credit: Althea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[61531,1159,1160,199,79],"class_list":["post-873883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astronomy-and-astrophysics","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}