Francis Halzen wins Nobel Physics Prize

STOCKHOLM, Oct 6: Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking work creating an observatory to detect some of the universe's most elusive particles, high-energy neutrinos, and how they are created.

Halzen realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track neutrinos, sometimes known as 'ghost particles' for the way they pass through the Earth and our bodies without a trace, and only interact 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."

The neutrino interactions collected by the IceCube observatory in Antarctica give researchers insight into how high-energy neutrinos are created, potentially revealing previously unknown cosmic phenomena, the body said.

"Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument," Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.
"His tenacity and scientific vision have paved the way for a new kind of astronomy."

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" �"Reuters