The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to Belgian Francis Halzen for his work on neutrinos in the heart of Antarctica. “It’s a big surprise, I certainly didn’t expect it,” reacted the 82-year-old laureate, contacted by telephone by the Nobel Foundation.
“This Nobel Prize concerns a gigantic ice cube located at the South Pole of our planet,” explained committee member Professor Eva Olsson. The neutrino “is the most discreet particle in the Universe,” explains the Nobel committee, and passes through “matter without being noticed.”
“In the 1980s, Francis Halzen realized that Antarctic ice could be ideal for capturing enough of these elusive neutrinos, so that researchers could learn more about their distant origins,” he points out.
Alongside Albert Einstein and Marie Curie
In addition to being one of the most prestigious awards on the planet, the Nobel consists of a diploma, a gold medal and a check for 12 million Swedish crowns, or nearly a million €.
Last year, it was awarded to a British-French-American trio for the discovery on a macroscopic scale of the “tunnel effect” in quantum mechanics, a science which describes the world of the infinitely small. This prize counts Albert Einstein and Marie Curie among its most famous winners.
This distinction is the second of the season after the medicine prize awarded Monday to an American-German trio, for their research aimed at unraveling the mysteries of the brain.
