“Beyond all the other risks, this was what really made the project possible – and that was pure luck.” We got hold of the new physics laureate Francis Halzen right after he learned of his Nobel Prize. In this conversation, he speaks about the hurdles that he and his... team had to overcome in the process of creating the neutrino detector on the South Pole – and how one of the crucial discoveries was ’totally unexpected.’ Halzen also talks about how his work on neutrino detection could lead to clues about the universe’s black holes.show more

Halzen first pitched catching neutrinos in South Pole ice in 1988. IceCube, a full cubic kilometre of instrumented ice, was finished in 2011. That's 23 years from idea to finished instrument.

"Pure luck" — but luck earned through decades of persistence and a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice. Congratulations to Francis Halzen and the entire IceCube team on the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics! #NobelPrize #IceCube

Halzen says the project was possible thanks to luck. And that the crucial discovery was totally unexpected. He is right on both counts. IceCube was a bet. A cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. No one knew if it would work. Luck mattered. But what Halzen calls "totally unexpected" is exactly what NMSI demonstrated on his data. Paper VIII showed that neutrinos traversing Earth's core exhibit a phase coherence excess. Delta R equals 2.43 times ten to the minus eighth. For downgoing, Delta R below ten to the minus thirteenth. Five orders of magnitude. Twelve criteria confirmed. Zero free parameters. This was not a sought discovery. It was a discovery hidden in public data, which no one had read with the right question. Halzen built the instrument. Luck helped. NMSI read the data. And the most important result of IceCube is not about the distant cosmos. It is about the core of the planet the neutrinos pass through. #NMSI #NobelPrize #IceCube #FrancisHalzen #Neutrinos #PNON #Luck #ScienceReform

Congratulations

Congratulations to Francis Halzen! IceCube is such a wild idea: a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice turned into a telescope, catching the faint blue Cherenkov flashes of neutrinos that crossed the universe.

❤️

To be or not to be. There are 3 basic particles in the universe namely electron, proton and neutron. Neutrino do not exist in nature. I did lot of meditation and found about these 3 particles. Rest every thing is absurd.