The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honoured the Belgian-born physicist for building a telescope inside Antarctic ice that detects cosmic neutrinos.

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• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 6, 2026.
• The prize goes to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison for contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.
• Halzen, 82, was born in Tienen, Belgium, and earned his PhD at KU Leuven in 1969.
• Neutrinos are tiny, elusive particles from the cosmos that rarely interact with matter, which is why they are called ghostly particles.
• Halzen's idea was to use natural glacial ice at the South Pole as a detector to capture neutrinos.
• IceCube sits beneath about 1.5 kilometres of ice near the geographic South Pole and turns one cubic kilometre of ice into a detector.
• The observatory has isolated high-energy neutrinos from beyond the Milky Way and has also detected neutrinos from within the Milky Way.
• The Nobel committee said his work laid the foundation for an entirely new kind of astronomy.
• This is the first physics Nobel awarded to a single person since Georges Charpak in 1992.
• The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor, and Halzen becomes the 11th Belgian Nobel laureate.
• The prize will be presented in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.