Physics Nobel goes to IceCube's Francis Halzen

Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contributions" to the detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen proposed building a neutrino detector in Antarctic ice in 1988; the resulting IceCube Neutrino Observatory was completed in 2011 and opened what the prize committee called "an entirely new kind of astronomy."

IceCube instruments a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice with thousands of light sensors, catching the faint flashes made when neutrinos — nearly massless particles that pass through almost everything — occasionally collide with atoms. The observatory has since traced high-energy neutrinos back to distant cosmic sources.

Sources: CNN