The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Francis Halzen the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, awarding him 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) and a place among the discipline’s most celebrated names. Halzen, a Belgian-American particle physicist, won for creating an observatory to detect high-energy neutrinos and for what the Academy called “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” The Academy announced the award on October 6.
Halzen said he was lucky the project worked. “I have to emphasise how lucky I was because, when we started this project, everybody realised this was maybe a good idea, but very few thought it would work, including myself,” he told a press conference by telephone. The prize comes from a single named institution, while the work itself required an observatory and a project completed in 2011.
Who Controls the Prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences chooses the physics prize. It carries 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), shared among winners if there are several; this year, Halzen received it. Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf presents Nobel medals at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, followed by a banquet at Stockholm City Hall. The formal procession is part of the award’s machinery: the Academy selects the winner, the King presents the medal, and guests attend a City Hall banquet.
Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prizes in his will, after building a fortune partly through the invention of dynamite. The prizes began in 1901, recognizing achievements in science, literature and peace. Sweden’s central bank later added the economics award. Physics held a prominent place in Nobel’s will and remains one of the discipline’s highest distinctions.
A Vast Observatory, One Laureate
Halzen first presented his idea for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988. IceCube now sits in Antarctica near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in a cubic kilometre of pristine ice that extends 2,500 metres below the surface. Each day, it registers about one high-energy neutrino.
People sometimes call neutrinos “ghost particles” because they pass through Earth and human bodies without a trace, interacting with matter extremely rarely. They’re nearly massless and electrically neutral, and they aren’t deflected by even the strongest magnetic fields. Unlike electromagnetic waves such as visible light, neutrinos point directly back to their source through their direction of arrival.
The observatory’s interactions offer information about how high-energy neutrinos form and may expose previously unknown phenomena, the Academy said. IceCube has found that the neutrinos come from both within and far outside our galaxy. Researchers hope to trace them to exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.
“The messengers bring information from the cosmos,” Eva Olsson, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said at a press conference. “They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars.”
Halzen said the discoveries’ main fruits still lay ahead, and that it was too early to say exactly what the method could reveal about the universe. “The real excitement is that I cannot answer that question yet,” he said. “This is just an introduction to the science, the astronomy is still to come.”
Recognition Has Its Own Ceremony
Smithsonian magazine called Halzen “Neutrino Man” in 2014, when it awarded him one of its Ingenuity Awards and praised an “amazing experiment (that) heralds the beginning of a new era in astronomy.” The magazine also published a comic, “How One Physicist’s Pursuit of the Cosmos Took Off in Antarctica.” Past physics laureates include Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr. The previous year’s prize went to U.S.-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for experiments demonstrating quantum physics in action, research seen as helping advance the next generation of computing and other digital technologies.
The 2026 physics award was the second Nobel announced that year, after Monday’s medicine prize announcement; the chemistry prize was set for Wednesday. Oslo hosts the peace prize, the only Nobel not presented in Sweden.