Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in Physics for work on ‘ghost particles’

Belgian physicist worked to build Antarctic observatory that tracks neutrinos from deep space.Belgian physicist Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating a giant detector in Antarctica that captures neutrinos, the so-called “ghost particles” from space that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the prestigious award in Stockholm on Tuesday, crediting Halzen with a central role in building the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Is there life on another planet? Scientists find the strongest evidence yetlist 2 of 3Have scientists discovered a dark matter particle?list 3 of 3Nobel medicine prize honours US and German scientists for optogenetics workend of listThe neutrino interactions collected by the observatory provide information about how high-energy neutrinos are created and may even reveal previously unknown phenomena, the Academy said.“It was a great surprise, and I obviously didn’t expect it,” Halzen said, speaking to the committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference to announce the winner.The 82-year-old said it was predicted before that he would win the Nobel Prize, but the announcement still made him feel “strange”.“I am working on a proposal, and I hope that this prize will help getting it approved,” he said to chuckles from the audience.‘Information from the cosmos’neutrinos have nearly no mass and carry no electric charge, so they can cross between planets, stars and human bodies without being altered, making them rare and hard to catch. There are roughly 100 trillion solar and cosmic neutrinos that pass through our bodies every second.Halzen first proposed the IceCube project in 1988, realising that the clear ice beneath the South Pole could act as a detector, so on the rare occurrence a neutrino strikes an atomic nucleus, it gives off a flash of light that buried sensors can record.