Belgian-born particle physicist; UW–Madison professor and IceCube founding director
Winners have been named in medicine, physics and chemistry, with a total prize pool of 12 million Swedish kronor. Medicine highlights optogenetics; physics advances neutrino research; chemistry recognizes work on mirror-image molecules. The literature prize and economics prize will be awarded later this week and next week respectively.
Belgian-born physicist Francis Halzen has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which uses Antarctic ice to detect high-energy neutrinos and illuminate the universe’s distant processes. The award recognizes a monumental, collaborative effort that has revealed neutrinos as cosmic messengers.
Scientists have tapped signals from the zeptoverse, a realm 100 billion times smaller than an atom, using data from the LHC. Cambridge-led work suggests new physics avenues and underpins upgrades to detectors, though funding questions in the UK loom over participation in future work.