Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize for IceCube experiment

Francis Halzen will receive the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics^*1. He gets the prize for his work on IceCube, a large experiment^*2 at the South Pole. Chiba University, a university in Japan, takes part in IceCube. The university shared the news on October 6, 2026.

IceCube looks for neutrinos^*3. Scientists from 14 countries work on it together. They have put more than 5,000 detectors^*4 deep in the ice of Antarctica.

The team from Chiba University is the only group from Japan in IceCube. Professor Shigeru Yoshida and Professor Aya Ishihara are members of the team. IceCube has made some important discoveries. In 2012, it found neutrinos with very high energy from space. This was the first time in the world. In 2018, it found a place in space where these neutrinos come from. No one had done this before. In 2021, it saw the Glashow resonance^*5 for the first time.

IceCube is now getting an upgrade^*6, and the work will finish in 2026. The Chiba team played a central part in designing and building the new detectors. The team will also have a main role in IceCube-Gen2, the next experiment that is planned for the future.

1. *1 Physics: the science of energy, light, and how things move
2. *2 experiment: a careful test that scientists do to learn something
3. *3 neutrinos: very, very small particles that fly through space and are hard to see
4. *4 detectors: machines that can see or feel something that people cannot
5. *5 Glashow resonance: a special and rare kind of crash between a neutrino and another very small particle
6. *6 upgrade: work that makes a machine or system newer and better