Physics 2026 · Announced Oct 6
He turned a cubic kilometer of South Pole ice into a telescope.
One winner
In plain words
Neutrinos are tiny particles that fly through almost everything. Halzen led the push to bury thousands of light sensors deep in Antarctic ice. When a neutrino hits the ice, it makes a faint blue flash. The sensors catch it.
Why it matters
Light and radio waves get blocked on their way to us. Neutrinos do not. IceCube gave us a new way to look at the most violent places in space, like the areas around giant black holes.
The official reason
"for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos…"
The winners
13
years from the first deep-space neutrinos (2013) to the prize
The long road
- 1990sA smaller test detector, AMANDA, is built at the South Pole.
- 2005Drilling starts on the full-size IceCube.
- 2010IceCube is finished: more than 5,000 sensors in the ice.
- 2013First high-energy neutrinos from outside our solar system.
- 2018A neutrino is traced back to a distant galaxy for the first time.
- 2026Nobel Prize in Physics.