The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Francis Halzen for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos arriving from the cosmos. Francis Halzen, 82, is the only winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in Belgium in 1944, he works in the United States, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was awarded for “his decisive contributions to the IceCube experiment”, the largest neutrino observatory in the world, which is located in the ice of Antarctica and which in 2018 managed to capture these elusive particles that arrive from the cosmos and pass through matter without leaving a trace.
Thanks to this discovery, pursued around the world for decades, Halzen’s research laid the foundations for a completely new type of astronomy.