University of Wisconsin professor awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

MADISON, Wis. – University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Francis Halzen was named the Nobel laureate in physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, thanks to his work in identifying neutrinos that may offer clues to how the universe evolved.

UW-Madison professor wins Nobel Prize

The backstory:

Halzen is the principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest telescope located in Antarctica. According to the university, the observatory is run by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at UW-Madison.

Back in 2013, IceCube announced the first detection of high-energy neutrinos from outside the solar system. That breakthrough opened a new era in which scientists could study distant events with light, neutrinos and gravitational waves, including supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies.

Other feats for IceCube include detecting a high-energy neutrino from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy in the direction of Orion in 2017 and providing the first evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from an active galaxy 47 million light-years away in 2022 and from the Milky Way in 2023.

What they’re saying:

Halzen said the work with IceCube couldn’t have happened without the help of the team around him.

“This is a celebration of a very unusual project,” said Halzen. “It is difficult to imagine that we could have pulled this off anywhere but at UW-Madison with its unique research infrastructure. The success of this project involved some luck, and I was fortunate to be at UW, where unconventional ideas can thrive and where I had the support of a remarkable community, from talented engineers at the Physical Sciences Laboratory to long-time colleagues on the faculty and supportive administrators. It is hard to imagine this project happening anywhere else.”

By the numbers:

UW-Madison said the prize makes Halzen the sixth physicist connected to the university to win a Nobel Prize and the 23rd Nobel Prize tied to the school overall. According to the university, that legacy spans medicine, chemistry, economics, engineering and physics, and the last active UW-Madison faculty member to win a Nobel Prize was Howard Temin in 1975 for discovering reverse transcriptase.

What are neutrinos?

Dig deeper:

Neutrinos are tiny cosmic particles with an extremely small mass and no electric charge, because of this, they are very difficult to detect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Also known as “ghost particles,” neutrinos spew from stars, with trillions of them moving through our bodies every second.

Scientists cannot glimpse neutrinos moving around on their own, so they measure what happens when the particles collide with other bits of matter. Neutrinos bump into other particles only rarely, so scientists build large detectors — like Halzen did with IceCube — to improve their odds of catching a neutrino in action.

According to the university, Halzen’s work with IceCube and searching for neutrinos can help scientists learn more about black holes, galaxies, and other objects in the cosmos.