Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Galzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award was given for his groundbreaking work in creating the Antarctic IceCube observatory, which allowed the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, some of the most elusive particles in the universe.
Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Galzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award was given for his groundbreaking work in creating the Antarctic IceCube observatory, which allowed the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, some of the most elusive particles in the universe.
The committee's decision was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences during a special press conference. This year's prize is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million).
Halzen was the first to realize that the ice layer at the South Pole could be used to track so-called “ghost particles.” Neutrinos can pass through the planet and human bodies without a trace, interacting extremely rarely with matter. The interaction data collected by the IceCube observatory are allowing researchers to understand the mechanisms of high-energy neutrino production and to detect previously unknown cosmic phenomena.
"These messengers bring information from space. They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of star explosions," said the academy's representative Eva Olsson.
The chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, Mark Peirce, emphasized that the scientist led an international team of researchers and engineers to create a unique instrument. According to him, Halzen's perseverance and scientific vision paved the way for a completely new kind of astronomy. In turn, in 2014, the American magazine Smithsonian called the physicist "Neutrino Man", dedicating a comic book to his experiments in Antarctica.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three American scientists for a breakthrough in quantum mechanics, who discovered that a process known as "tunneling" — a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which particles move directly through a barrier — can occur on much larger scales than previously thought.
