Briefs · Frontier Science
The Man Who Turned a Cubic Kilometre of Antarctic Ice Into a Telescope
The 2026 Physics Nobel went to a man who turned a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice into a telescope — and waited 38 years for the universe to answer.
Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the prize alone on 6 October “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”. He first proposed using South Pole ice as a neutrino detector in 1988. IceCube, finished in 2011, threads more than 5,000 light sensors through a billion tonnes of ice, 2.5 kilometres deep, watching for the faint blue flashes of neutrinos colliding with ice.
In 2013 it caught the first neutrinos from beyond the solar system; in 2018 it traced some to a blazar, TXS 0506+056. Some 450 scientists at 58 institutions in 14 countries now work on the observatory. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor.
Conclusion: Halzen did not build a telescope, but rather froze one — and the ghost particles, at last, showed up in the ice.
Read the original at NobelPrize.org
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