2026 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Francis Halzen for discovery of high-energy neutrinos
Scientific American · LC · trust 33/100
2026 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Francis Halzen, pioneer of high-energy neutrinos
Francis Halzen is a leader in the study of neutrinos, ghostly particles from across the universe that hint at exciting new physics
The 2026 Nobel prize in physics is awarded to Francis Halzen for “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Halzen is a Belgium-born physicist, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and principal investigator at t he IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.
“It’s very exciting,” says Michael H. Moloney, CEO of the American Institute of Physics. “It's a timely and an important recognition of the extraordinary work that Dr. Halzen did to open up a whole new window on the universe.”
Indeed, IceCube gave humankind a fresh glimpse of the cosmos when it came online in 2010. Unlike most telescopes across the globe that gather starlight, this unique observatory sees the universe via ghostly messengers called neutrinos . Combining the two has improved our understanding of some of the most distant and violent physical processes in the cosmos.
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A view of the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica.
Neutrinos are the least understood of the seventeen fundamental particles known to exist. They nearly always move through matter as if it isn’t there. So massive detectors are required to capture and study their exceedingly rare collisions with atoms.
IceCube does this with arrays of specialized cameras dispersed in the crystal-clear ice a mile beneath the surface of Antarctica. A high-energy neutrino, accelerated at the center of a faraway galaxy, will usually zip right through this subterranean deep freeze. But occasionally, it will hit an atom in a molecule of water ice, producing a shower of light that the cameras collect and use to reconstruct the neutrinos energy and direction of origin.
IceCube is the first gigaton neutrino detector ever built and was primarily designed to observe neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources in our universe.
The observatory is an ambitious and unprecedented feat of engineering. It was constructed by boring deep holes across a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice using jets of hot water, then carefully lowering long strings of cameras into them. It remains the largest neutrino telescope in the world. This year’s Nobel therefore awards exactly the kind of modern, large-scale experimental science that is under financial threat in places like the United States, where IceCube originated. (Another major U.S. neutrino project, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, is currently under construction a mile beneath South Dakota’s Black Hills, and could help reveal the origins of ordinary matter.)
“It’s big, publicly funded science,” says Moloney. “It shows that when we design audacious experiments, we can discover extraordinary things.”
The Nobel Prize in Physics, first given in 1901, has been previously awarded 119 times to 229 individuals. Those include Marie Curie in 1903 for making sense of radioactivity; Albert Einstein in 1921 for discovering how light and matter interact; I.I. Rabi in 1944 for the science behind MRIs; and Frederick Reines in 1995 for the discovery of (low-energy) neutrinos. Before Halzen’s win today, the last time the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a single person was in 1992, to the French physicist Georges Charpak.
More recently, the physics Nobel prize has recognized a tool for studying the motion of electrons (2023), the development of core techniques for building many of today’s artificial intelligence models (2024), and the creation and study of weird quantum phenomena in macroscopic, hand-held devices (2025).
The prize will be presented in Stockholm on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
Editor’s Note (10/6/26): This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
Joseph Howlett is a senior reporter at Scientific American covering physics, math, astronomy, and more. He was previously a math staff writer at Quanta Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from Columbia University.
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