Francis Halzen wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics

Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (the world’s largest telescope designed to detect neutrinos, subatomic particles with almost no mass and no electric charge) and for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos originating from space, Reuters reported.

Neutrinos are very small particles that have an extremely low mass and interact very little with matter.

In this case, these are very high-energy neutrinos, which come from very powerful objects or processes in the universe.

The IceCube Observatory is a large research centre located in the Antarctic ice, used to detect and study these particles arriving on Earth from space.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This year’s prize totals 12 million Swedish kronor, around 1.2 million dollars, an amount that is shared among the winners if there is more than one.

The Nobel Prizes were created under the will of the Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel, whose fortune was created partly from the invention of dynamite.

The prizes were first awarded in 1901 and honour achievements in science, literature and peace. Later, Sweden’s central bank also added the prize for economics.

Physics held an important place in Nobel’s will, and the Nobel Prize in Physics continues to be regarded as one of the highest honours in the field.

Over the decades, it has been awarded to scientists for discoveries that have fundamentally changed the way humanity understands the universe.

Among the previous winners are some of the most famous names in science, such as Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr. Their work helped create the foundations of modern physics.

Last year’s Physics prize went to the US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, for experiments that demonstrated in practice the principles of quantum physics, a field of physics that studies the behaviour of matter and energy at extremely small scales.

Their research was considered important for the development of the next generation of computers and other digital technologies.

The Nobel Peace Prize is the only prize not awarded in Sweden, but presented separately in Oslo, Norway.