Nobel physics prize 2026 goes to Francis Halzen for IceCube neutrino work

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on 6 October local time that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal researcher at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. He was cited for decisive contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin, according to Caixin, China News Service, Jiemian and Huxiu. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]

Caixin put the announcement at 11:45 local time in Sweden, or 17:45 Beijing time. CLS and Yicai issued short flashes at 17:50 and 17:53, China News Service followed at 18:02 with the citation and a history of the prize, cnBeta published an explainer at 18:10, Caixin added the English citation at 18:11, Jiemian reported at 18:22 citing CCTV News, and Huxiu ran a longer feature at 18:34. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]

The work concerns the neutrino. cnBeta noted that neutrinos pass through the Earth and through human bodies unnoticed, and that only in extremely rare cases does a single neutrino interact with an atomic nucleus, so detection requires very large instruments. Huxiu said 65 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through a human fingernail every second. IceCube, described by cnBeta and Huxiu, covers one cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, was completed in 2011 and holds sensors in ice that is extremely pure and transparent below a depth of 1,400 metres, allowing a flash of light to travel 300 metres. [ 4 , 7 ]

According to cnBeta and Huxiu, Halzen first publicly proposed using Antarctic ice to capture neutrinos at a conference in Poland in 1988. The team began with the AMANDA project, whose first optical module cable was lowered in 1993 and which was completed in 2000 but was too small to detect high-energy cosmic neutrinos; the larger IceCube followed. Huxiu reported that the collaboration published its first evidence of cosmic neutrinos in 2013, with later data judged sufficient to confirm it. [ 4 , 7 ]

The Nobel physics committee chair, Mark Pearce, said Halzen had led an international team of researchers and engineers to build the detector, and that his perseverance and scientific vision opened a new kind of astronomy, cnBeta reported. [ 4 ]

China News Service noted that the physics prize has been awarded 119 times between 1901 and 2025, with 230 awards of the prize to individuals and 229 recipients through 2025. It said John Bardeen won the prize twice, in 1956 and 1972; the youngest laureate was Lawrence Bragg, at 25 in 1915, and the oldest was Arthur Ashkin, at 96 in 2018. [ 3 ]

Huxiu said Halzen was born in 1944 in Tienen, Belgium, and earned his doctorate at KU Leuven in 1969. It reported that 79 neutrino events had been recorded from the direction of the active galaxy NGC 1068 but that the evidence is not yet sufficient, that high-energy neutrinos from the Milky Way appear to come from cosmic rays colliding with interstellar gas, and that IceCube-Gen2 is planned to expand the detector to eight cubic kilometres of ice, with several northern-hemisphere neutrino telescopes also under construction. [ 7 ]