Belgian physicist praised for work on the IceCube detector that observes the ghost-like particles in Antarctica

The Nobel prize in physics 2026 has been awarded to a researcher who turned an enormous block of ice at the south pole into a detector for ghostly particles called neutrinos that reach Earth from outer space.

Prof Francis Halzen, a Belgian particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led work on the IceCube neutrino observatory, which made the first detection of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos in 2013, soon after it was switched on.