ESTOCOLMO, Oct 6 (Reuters) – The Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work in creating an observatory to detect some of the universe’s most elusive particles — high-energy neutrinos — and to understand how they are produced.
Halzen realized that the ice at the South Pole could be used to track neutrinos, sometimes known as “ghost particles” for the way they traverse the Earth and our bodies without leaving traces, and interact with matter only in extremely rare cases.
“Messengers bring information from the cosmos,” said Eva Olsson of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference. “They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars.”
HALZEN IS PRAISED FOR DETECTING “MESSENGERS OF THE COSMOS”
The neutrino interactions recorded by the IceCube Observatory in Antarctica provide researchers with knowledge about how high-energy neutrinos are created, and may even reveal cosmic phenomena hitherto unknown, the agency stated.
“Francis Halzen led an international team of researchers and engineers that provided us with a fantastic instrument,” said Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel Prize in Physics Committee, in a statement.
“His tenacity and scientific vision paved the way for a new kind of astronomy.”
In 2014, the American magazine Smithsonian named Halzen the “Man of the Neutrino” when awarding him one of its Ingenuity Prizes, praising him for an “incredible experiment (that) heralds the dawn of a new era in astronomy”.
The magazine even published a comic strip illustrating his life: “How a physicist’s quest for the cosmos took off in Antarctica.”
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and receive a total prize of 12 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million), which is divided among the winners if there is more than one.
The Nobel Prizes were created by the will of Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, whose fortune was built, in part, on the invention of dynamite. Awarded for the first time in 1901, the prizes honor achievements in science, literature, and peace, with the economics prize having been added later by the Swedish central bank.
