Belgian Francis Halzen has been the subject of speculation about the Nobel Prize in Physics for many years.
At the same time, it was far from certain that the observatory in Antarctica would become a reality, the laureate himself says.
That is why Francis Halzen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, is keen to highlight the people who worked with him. He says that “no respectable” physicist wanted to join him when he started, as it was unclear where the research would lead.
The universities of Uppsala and Stockholm were among the first to join the project, he says by telephone during the Nobel Committee’s press conference.
Francis Halzen receives the prize “for crucial contributions to the IceCube Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”
“It feels strange. I was at a science festival last week where they basically said I was going to get the prize. It felt strange, and even stranger now that it’s hit home,” says Francis Halzen.
“Extremely stubborn”
Research on neutrinos has been recognized with the Nobel Prize several times before.
But this time, the prize is being awarded for an idea, according to Eva Lindroth, a professor of physics at Stockholm University and a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
The prize is being awarded for the grand idea of building a detector in one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole, she says.
It was a “crazy idea” too, Eva Lindroth admits.
He almost deserves an award just for being so persistent. He’s been doing this for over 30 years and was quite alone at first, but has gathered more and more people around him, she says.
But it’s clearly a crazy idea to go to the South Pole and build a big detector deep in the ice.
“No one notices”
The problem with the enigmatic neutrinos is that they are extremely difficult to detect.
Even with Francis Halzen’s idea for a gigantic ice observatory, detecting the particles is far from straightforward. They come from extremely energetic processes far out in the universe.
We are constantly being penetrated by neutrinos. They pass right through the Earth and no one notices. So you need an incredibly large detector to occasionally detect a single neutrino, says Eva Lindroth.
Francis Halzen, born in 1944, presented his idea as early as 1988. But the observatory was not completed until 2011.
Within a few years, the researchers were able to publish their first findings, including the discovery of neutrinos that must have come from far beyond our solar system.
The prize is about giving astronomers new opportunities to learn about the universe, not just the Milky Way but more distant places, says Eva Lindroth.
The neutrino is the “shyest particle in the universe,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Sweden’s national academy of sciences) says in its press material about the award.
It has no electric charge and almost no mass.
Neutrinos come from the sun, where billions of them pass through our bodies every second. But many also originate far beyond our solar system.
Francis Halzen first put forward his idea of using the ice at the South Pole to capture the enigmatic particles in the late 1980s.
It eventually became the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which laid the foundation for a whole new type of astronomy. In the “ice cube,” neutrinos can be observed through flashes of light that form when the particles, in rare cases, collide with an atomic nucleus.
The first attempts to lower light sensors into the glacial ice were made as early as 1992. But it took about 20 years to achieve a major breakthrough and discover neutrinos that researchers say came from distant parts of space.
Source: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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