WorldPosted at: Oct 6 2026 7:00PM


Belgian-American physicist Prof Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting cosmic neutrinos

Tienen, Oct 6 (UNI) Belgian-American physicist Prof Francis Halzen has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on IceCube, an observatory at the South Pole that detects elusive particles travelling across the universe.
Halzen, now a US citizen and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which uses thousands of light sensors embedded deep in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice to detect high-energy neutrinos.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Halzen's "vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental" to the observatory. He first presented his idea for detecting neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988.
Speaking at a news conference, Halzen said he had been surprised by how successfully the concept worked.
"I have to emphasise how lucky I was," he said. "When we started this project, everybody realised this was maybe a good idea, but very few thought it would work, including myself."
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that rarely interact with matter. Billions produced by the Sun pass through an area the size of a fingernail every second without causing any noticeable effect. IceCube, however, is designed to detect much higher-energy neutrinos produced by violent processes far beyond the Solar System.
The observatory consists of thousands of sensors attached to long cables drilled deep into the Antarctic ice. When a neutrino occasionally interacts with an atomic nucleus, it produces fast-moving charged particles that generate a faint blue flash as they travel through the ice.
The timing and pattern of that light allow scientists to estimate the direction from which the neutrino arrived, helping trace it back to its cosmic source. Because neutrinos rarely interact with matter and carry no electric charge, they can travel through dense regions of space without being absorbed or having their paths bent by magnetic fields.
That makes them valuable astronomical messengers, offering information about environments that conventional telescopes cannot easily observe, including exploding stars and regions surrounding giant black holes where particles are accelerated to extreme energies.
"Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument," said Prof Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. "His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy."
Louis Barson, director of Science at the Institute of Physics in London, said IceCube had enabled astronomers to investigate phenomena beyond the reach of conventional telescopes.
"The discoveries that have followed are helping us understand some of the most energetic and mysterious processes in the universe — and that's thanks to Professor Halzen's work," he said.
Prof Subir Sarkar, a physicist at the University of Oxford, compared Halzen's contribution to the words of French novelist Marcel Proust about seeing the Universe through the eyes of others.
"Francis Halzen has led the IceCube collaboration on just such a voyage of discovery and opened a new window on to our Universe," Sarkar said.
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