Francis Halzen wins Nobel Physics Prize for Antarctic ‘ghost particle’ hunt

Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work developing an observatory to detect high-energy neutrinos - elusive particles that pass through Earth and our bodies virtually undetected. The 82-year-old realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track these "ghost particles", which interact with matter extremely rarely.

The IceCube observatory in Antarctica, located at a depth of 2,500 metres in pristine Antarctic ice, searches for nearly massless high-energy neutrinos with the aim of tracing their paths back to sources such as exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars. The detector is expected to register about one neutrino per day.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral and unaffected by magnetic fields, which means their arrival direction points directly back to their source. Halzen first proposed capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988 and led the project to completion in 2011, despite initial skepticism from others about its feasibility.

The Nobel Prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and comes with a prize sum of 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), shared among the winners if there are multiple. Established in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, the prize remains one of the highest distinctions in the field of physics. Previous laureates include Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr, whose work laid the foundations of modern physics.