Halzen wins Nobel Physics Prize for ‘Ghost particle’ tracking

Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen have won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for ground-breaking work creating an observatory to detect some of the universe’s most elusive particles, high-energy neutrinos, and how they are created.

Halzen's work realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track neutrinos, sometimes known as ‘ghost particles’ for the way they pass through the Earth and our bodies without a trace, and only interact with matter extremely rarely.

In 2014, the US-based Smithsonian magazine, dubbed Halzen “Neutrino Man” when giving him one of its ingenuity Awards, acclaiming him for an “amazing experiment that heralds the beginning of a new era in astronomy”.

It even published a comic illustrating his life: “How One Physicist’s Pursuit of the Cosmos Took Off in Antarctica” 

“The messengers bring information from the cosmos,” Eva Olsson, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a press conference. “They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars.”

The neutrino interactions collected by the IceCube observatory in Antarctica provide researchers with knowledge about how high-energy neutrinos are created, potentially even revealing previously unknown cosmic phenomena, the body said.

“Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument,” Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.

“His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy.”

Nobel physics prize winners are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and receive a prize sum totalling 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), which is shared among the winners if there are several.

‘Ghost particle’ hunter Halzen wins Nobel Physics Prize

The Nobel Prizes were established under the will of Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel, whose fortune was built in part on the invention of dynamite. First awarded in 1901, the prizes honour achievements in science, literature and peace, with the economics award added later by Sweden’s central bank.

Among past laureates are some of the most celebrated figures in science, including Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, whose work helped establish the foundations of modern physics.

Last year’s physics prize was awarded to US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for experiments that demonstrated the principles of quantum physics in action, research seen as helping to advance the next generation of computing and other digital technologies.