The 2026 Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to Francis Halzen for his “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I am joined by the University of Oxford neutrino physicist Kirsty Duffy and Physics World’s Matin Durrani to talk about this year’s prize. This is the fifth time a Nobel prize has been awarded for work on neutrinos, and we explore why physicists are so enamoured with these elusive particles.

• In this podcast we refer to my video conversation with Francis Halzen and his colleague James Roth and to Halzen’s book Quarks & Leptons. Kirsty Duffy presents the Even Bananas series of videos about neutrinos.

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Francis Halzen wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”.

The prize will be awarded in Stockholm, Sweden on 10 December and is worth SEK 12 million (about $1.2 million).

Born in Belgium, Halzen is based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. Nearly four decades ago Halzen realized that the ice at the South Pole could be used to detect cosmic neutrinos. The first attempt was called AMANDA, which was completed in 2000 but not large enough to be up to the task. It was expanded to create IceCube by the end of 2010.

IceCube comprises thousands of light detectors in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice. Occasionally a neutrino will interact with the ice and create particles that generate light as they travel through the ice. By tracking these particles, Halzen and colleagues can determine where in the sky the neutrino came from.

Speaking on the telephone shortly after the announcement Halzen said, “It was a great surprise and I didn’t expect it. It’s a great pleasure to hear about this prize.” 

“This was an adventure”

He added, “When I reflect on this moment, I have to say how lucky I am. This was an adventure where success was not guaranteed, but we overcame many challenges. It was a long journey. I want to emphasize again how lucky I was to take contributions from collaborators. It feels strange. I hope it reflects on the courageous people who joined me on this project. Many talented people joined me on this journey.”

He was also thankful for the support of his university, “I was lucky to be in the right place [Wisconsin] when this idea [to build IceCube] came up.”

Commenting on whether neutrinos could be used to communicate with extra-terrestrial beings, Halzen quipped, “This has already been proposed by several friends of mine. It has been speculated that this would be an ideal way to communicate with aliens but I don’t think I will go there. I think we have enough realistic problems to deal with right now to make neutrino astronomy a reality.”

When asked what he will do for the rest of today, Halzen replied “I’m working on a proposal. I hope this prize will help get it approved.” 

“Halzen had the idea together with a colleague in 1988 to use the ice at the South Pole as a medium to detect neutrinos,” said Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, who is also an astroparticle physicist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

International collaboration

Pearce adds, “Halzen has spearheaded an international collaboration of more than 450 people from 58 institutions in 14 countries around the world to realize this enormous neutrino detector.”

Halzen is the first sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics since Georges Charpak won it in 1992, with Pierre-Gilles de Gennes being the previous lone laureate in 1991.

This is the fifth Nobel prize related to neutrinos. The first went to the discovery of the muon neutrino, which was recognized by the Nobel committee in 1988. It was followed by the first observation of the neutrino itself (1995), the detection of cosmic neutrinos (2002), and the discovery of neutrino oscillations – the fact that neutrinos can switch from one type to another – in 2015.

Pearce explains why physicists are so fascinated by the elusive subatomic particle: “The neutrino has such peculiar properties, the fact it interacts so infrequently in material, and in this case it’s a way of bringing information about distant cosmic sources that we are unable to acquire in other ways.”

Halzen was born in Tienen, Belgium, in 1944. He graduated with an MSc in physics from the University of Louvain in 1966 and then a PhD from the same university in 1969.

After a stint at the CERN particle-physics lab, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972, where he also became the principal investigator on the AMANDA neutrino observatory in Antarctica and the IceCube project.

IceCube was completed in late 2010. Then, it comprised 5160 digital optical modules suspended along 86 strings, each up to 2.5 km long and embedded under the ice at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The strings are spaced to create a total detector volume of a cubic kilometre. Neutrinos interact with matter only extremely weakly, so the array instead detects the tiny flashes of Cherenkov light produced when the neutrinos collide with hydrogen or oxygen nuclei inside the ice and create secondary particles. Under ideal circumstances, the detector signal can be used to work out where in the sky the neutrino came from.

In 2013 the IceCube Collaboration published details of its observation of 28 extremely high-energy particle events, created by neutrinos with energies of at least 30 TeV. The findings represented the first evidence for high-energy cosmic neutrinos, which originate from outside the solar system.

Two years later, IceCube confirmed the cosmic origin of high-energy neutrinos with an independent search in the Northern Hemisphere. This study examined muon neutrinos reaching IceCube through the Earth, using the planet to filter out the large background of atmospheric muons. Data analysis suggested that more than half of the 21 neutrinos detected above 100 TeV were of cosmic origin.

In 2018 IceCube, along with astronomers working on two gamma-ray telescopes, found compelling evidence that a known blazar – called TXS 0506+056a and located about 4 billion light-years from Earth – was a source of high-energy neutrinos detected by IceCube. This was an important milestone in multimessenger astronomy, whereby astronomical objects are studied by observing several different types of radiation.

Another breakthrough came in 2021 when IceCube was the first to spot an interaction called a Glashow resonance. This interaction was first predicted in 1960 and involves the collision of high-energy antineutrino with an electron to create a W boson. In 2022 the galaxy NGC 1068 was identified as a source of high-energy neutrinos and in 2023 IceCube showed that the Milky Way is also a source of high-energy neutrinos.

Earlier this year an upgrade of IceCube added more than 600 new light sensors in five new holes drilled in the ice near the centre of the detector.

• In 2013 Halzen and his IceCube colleagues won the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award. Hamish Johnston spoke to him about the experiment in this video:

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Next Tuesday the winner(s) of the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced. To celebrate that most famous of prizes this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at a few fun aspects of past awards.

I’m joined by my Physics World colleague Matin Durrani to make a few predictions for next week. We also talk about our latest Nobel infographic – which looks at the time it took for countries to claim their first Nobel laureate.

Then I am joined by the Indian engineer Preetish Kakoty to talk about CV Raman, who was India’s first physics laureate. We chat about two ocean voyages that Raman took – journeys that reveal much about his devotion to science and his strong self-belief.

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How long did it take for your country to claim a physics Nobel laureate? Or perhaps you live in one of the 170 or so countries that has yet to produce a Nobel prize winner?

The aim of our latest infographic (see figure) is to answer that question by exploring the geographical evolution of laureates. Creating it, however,  quickly became an exercise in the history of the past two centuries.

Map-changing wars in Europe, the demise of colonialism, and immigration made it surprising difficult to ascribe some laureates to specific countries and led to at least one debate amongst Physics World colleagues. I will get into some of these idiosyncrasies after I take a general look at the infographic.

What is obvious is the early Nobel physics laureates come from what many call the west. Germany is considered by many to be the birthplace of modern physics, so it is not surprising that the country had the shortest wait – with Wilhelm Röntgen bagging the first prize (in 1901) for his discovery of X-rays.

Until 1930, when the Indian physicist CV Raman won the prize for his eponymous scattering effect, the prize was only awarded to people from western countries. Indeed, of the 22 countries that can claim laureates (by our measures), only five are not in the west. These are India, Pakistan, Japan, Soviet Union/Russia and China. So far, there have been no laureates from Africa, Latin America or much of Asia and Oceania.

While much of this is down to better access to education and research resources in the west, increasing global mobility means that students and researchers from all over the world are working in the west – and wealthy countries like China, South Korea and Japan. So why aren’t they bagging Nobel firsts for their home countries?

Indeed, only three laureates in the infographic who took that route are China’s Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee – who did their prize-winning work in the US – and Abdus Salam, who did much of his prize-winning work in the UK and Italy. Hopefully, this year’s crop of winners will include someone who is not from one of those 22 countries. While it’s likely that they will be working in the west, wouldn’t it be great if they won for work done in their home country.

Established nations

So how did we decide where a laureate is from? To work this out we considered where that person was born, where that place is today and – in some cases – what we know about a laureate’s view on their own nationality.

A case in point is Ernest Walton, who we consider to be the first Irish laureate. He was born in 1903 in Dungarvan, which is on the south-east coast of the Republic of Ireland. At the time of his birth, however, his birthplace was in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – as all of Ireland was then a constituent nation of the UK. So Walton was born a British subject.

However, we consider him Irish for several reasons. First, although Ireland was not a sovereign country in 1903, it was a well-established national entity that was on the road to independence before Walton reached adulthood. Second, although Walton did his award-winning research in England, he spent most of his life in Ireland. Third, there is no evidence that he was a unionist – someone who opposes Irish independence and considers themselves British.

The above might upset readers in Scotland and Wales because both of those nations have spawned physics laureates who don’t appear in our infographic. But unlike in international football, rugby and cricket, Scotland and Wales will have to wait for independence from the UK before they get their own laureate teams in our infographic.

Similarly, Marie Curie was born in Poland when it was a part of the Russian Empire. But Poland was identifiable as a country in 1867 and it gained independence during Curie’s lifetime. Indeed, Curie was clearly a proud Pole, because she named the element polonium after her homeland in the hope that Poland would become unified and independent.

We have included Lawrence Bragg as the first Australian to win a Nobel prize. He was born in Adelaide in 1890, when the Australian colonies began the journey to independence from the UK. While Bragg is often considered British, we have decided he is Australian because he left the country for the UK in 1908 – seven years after Federation created the Commonwealth of Australia, which was independent from the UK for domestic issues.

Dealing with decolonization

I mentioned that there are no laureates from Africa in our infographic, but three physics Nobel prize winners were born on the continent. These are Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (born in Algeria), Serge Haroche (born in Morocco) and Pierre Agostini (born in Tunisia). However, all were born when these countries were French colonies and they all left for France when they gained independence.

Some readers might be scratching their heads over how we have dealt with the time Pakistan had to wait for its first Nobel prize. Salam bagged that prize in 1979 – so a 78-year wait from 1901, when the first prize was awarded. So why have we calculated the wait as just 32 years?

The reason is that unlike Ireland, Poland or Australia, the concept of Pakistan didn’t exist when Salam was born in Lahore in the British Raj in 1926. The word Pakistan is thought to have originated in 1933 and the call for a Muslim homeland crystalized in 1940 with the Lahore Resolution. So, we have decided to start the clock for Salam in 1947.

Other laureates who merited scrutiny include Albert Michelson, who was born in Poland but arrived in the US age two. As a result, we consider him to be the first American laureate. Indeed, Michelson wouldn’t appear in the infographic if we considered him a Pole because he was pipped at the post by Marie Curie.

Similarly, Gabriel Lippmann was born Luxembourg to French parents and moved to France age three, so we consider him French and not the first laureate from Luxembourg. However, we are a big fan of Lippmann here at Physics World because of the nature of his award – which was for a still-obscure colour-photography technique.

Indeed, my colleague Margaret Harris bagged an award of her own from Association of British Science Writers for her feature article that explores Lippmann’s prize, and that of Gustaf Dalén – the first Swede to win a physics Nobel prize. That article is called “The physics Nobel prizes you’ve never heard of”.

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Here at Physics World we have had some luck with predicting who is going to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. One successful strategy is to identify top physicists and just keep predicting that they will win – and eventually they do!

For example, we picked Anton Zeilinger for the 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2019 prizes – and he won in 2022. Clearly, it was a mistake to give up on him in 2020.

In making our predictions we sometimes rely on an infographic that we have been updating for a decade or so. It shows the chronological progression of Nobel prizes in terms of fields of endeavour – such as condensed matter, particle and nuclear, quantum and more (see figure).

By staring at the infographic for far too long, we have convinced ourselves that there is a regular pattern of gaps between prizes in specific fields. Looking at the latest version of the infographic it appears that both condensed-matter physics, and particle and nuclear physics are due a prize.

I have really struggled to think of a particle and nuclear breakthrough that could bag the 2026 Nobel – but I believe I have come up with one or two contenders. One is a prize for physicists working on CERN’s ATHENA and ALPHA collaborations, who were the first to trap cold antihydrogen atoms and then study them in detail. One laureate would surely be the Denmark-based American physicist Jeffrey Hangst, who is a founder of both collaborations. Making extremely precise comparisons of the properties of antihydrogen and hydrogen could reveal why there appears to be much more matter than antimatter in the universe – an important mystery in physics.

But alas, these and other antimatter experiments have yet to find any significant deviations from the Standard Model description of antihydrogen, so that might preclude a Nobel prize for Hansgt and one or two of his colleagues. And another caveat is one could easily argue that many of the innovations at ATHENA and ALPHA are in the field of atomic and molecular physics, not particle and nuclear physics – so there would be much debate here at Physics World if we had to update our infographic with an antihydrogen prize.

Another potential prize in particle and nuclear physics is for the the creation of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). This is a state of matter that occurs very briefly when large nuclei (such as lead or gold) are collided at high energies. The result is a soup of quarks and gluons that is thought to resemble the early universe shortly after the Big Bang. Studying the QGP is a fascinating and important area of physics, but because the experimental work has been done by large collaborations at both CERN in Switzerland and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US it would be difficult to select just three people as Nobel winners. The fact that scientific breakthroughs in particle and nuclear physics are often made by large collaborations has led some to call for the three-person limit on prize winners to be lifted.

The field of condensed matter is much more fruitful when it comes to potential Nobel prizes. The analytics company Clarivate has released its “Citation laureates 2026 in physics”, which predicts Nobel winners based on the citation impact of their published research. Clarivate (and its predecessor Thomson Reuters) has a reasonably good record of picking winners and this year all three of its predictions are in condensed matter physics.

Organic LEDs

One prediction is a prize to Chihaya Adachi, Stephen Forrest and Mark Thompson for work leading to the development of ultrahigh-efficiency organic light-emitting diodes. The second is to Nicola Spaldin for her theoretical work on room-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroics, which Clarivate says are enabling new energy-efficient device paradigms. The third prediction is to Qikun Xue “for experimental observation of the quantum anomalous Hall Effect”. What all three of these awards have in common is a relatively immediate connection of the development of new technologies.

Spaldin was profiled in Physics World back in 2023 and she talks about the joy that she gets from her research, which combines blue-sky research with the design of real materials.

Other prestigious awards are also a good place to look for potential Nobel winners. The 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience went to the physicists Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan MacDonald for their pioneering work on twistronics. This is a burgeoning field that involves rotating the relative angle between two sheets of 2D material such as graphene. Rotations create moiré superlattices with a wide range of electronic properties including superconductivity.

I am also keen on an award for the applied physicist Federico Capasso. As well as developing a wide range of semiconductor technologies – including  the quantum cascade laser – Capasso has done seminal work on optical metamaterials. An award for such metamaterials could be shared with John Pendry (a 2024 Kavli nanoscience laureate), who has developed a mathematical framework for designing optical metamaterials. These days prizes are usually awarded to trios, so potential partners for Capasso and Pendry are David Smith – a pioneer in creating metamaterials that operate at microwave frequencies – and Andrea Alù who is a prolific researcher in photonic metamaterials. Other possible winners in this field are Ulf Leohardt, Nader Engheta, George Eleftheriades and Vladimir Shalaev.

Wavelet theory

Finally, a potential prize that I find intriguing is inspired by “Clarivate’s Citation laureates 2025 in physics”. This proposes Ingrid Daubechies, Stéphane Mallat and Yves Meyer “for advancing wavelet theory, a revolution in mathematics and physics with practical applications including image processing”. Such an award would be difficult to shoehorn into a category in our infographic. I think applied physics would be the best fit.

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday 6 October at 10:45 a.m. BST at the earliest.

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This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Lin Ma, who is at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research group tackles energy and environmental challenges using sustainable materials and electrochemical techniques.

In this episode I chat with Ma about the growing importance of energy storage in electricity grids. Much of this is driven by the growth of wind and solar generation, which can both be intermittent in nature.

Ma talks about the batteries that are currently used in grids and explains what improvements are needed as more renewable energy comes on line. We chat about the different battery technologies that can be used for grid storage and Lin explains why sodium-ion batteries offer advantages over lithium-based devices when it comes to large-scale deployment. Lin also talks about some of the safety issues surrounding large battery facilities and how artificial intelligence can be used to improve many aspects of battery technology.

This podcast is presented in partnership with the Electrochemical Society. The mission of the ECS is to advance theory and practice at the forefront of electrochemical and solid state science and technology, and allied subjects.

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