Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 Explained: Francis Halzen, IceCube and the Neutrino Ghost Particle

Who won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2026? Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from space. So what is a neutrino, and why is it called the ghost particle? About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, and almost none of them touch a single atom. In this video: how Wolfgang Pauli proposed the neutrino in 1930, how Cowan and Reines first detected it in 1956, why the Sun's neutrinos come up through the ground at night, how the IceCube neutrino detector was frozen into a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, and how it traced a high-energy neutrino to a likely source: a blazar four billion light-years away. Also from this year's Nobel Prizes: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine explained, controlling the brain with light (optogenetics):    • What Is Optogenetics? Controlling the Brai...   Chapters: 0:00 What is a ghost particle? 0:36 1930: energy goes missing 0:50 Pauli's desperate remedy: the neutrino 1:08 Why are neutrinos so hard to detect? 1:31 A wall of lead a light-year thick 1:37 1956: the first neutrino detected 1:58 Neutrinos from the Sun 2:30 Neutrinos at night, through the Earth 2:45 Why neutrinos are perfect messengers 3:13 Why Antarctica's ice? 3:41 How IceCube was built 4:09 Cherenkov light: how IceCube sees 4:35 Looking down through the Earth 4:48 2013: Bert and Ernie 5:02 2017: a neutrino from a blazar 5:27 NGC 1068 and the Milky Way in neutrinos 5:49 The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics 6:01 Recap Sources (every number in the video): Nobel Prize in Physics 2026, press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/phy... IceCube detector facts (86 strings, 5,160 sensors, 1,450-2,450 m, drilling): https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icec... Last IceCube string, Dec 2010 (Berkeley Lab): https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/12/17... 100 trillion neutrinos per second (Fermilab): https://minerva.fnal.gov/why-study-ne... What's a neutrino, history of the name (Fermilab): https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/whats-a-ne... Neutrinos all around you (NASA): https://science.nasa.gov/universe/sto... Pauli's 1930 letter, Cowan-Reines 1956 (APS News): https://www.aps.org/publications/apsn... Light's slow escape from the Sun (NASA): https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/in... Super-Kamiokande's neutrino image of the Sun (NASA APOD): https://science.nasa.gov/image-articl... Solar neutrinos day vs night (Physics Today): https://physicstoday.aip.org/news/to-... 2013 first high-energy astrophysical neutrinos: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases... 2017 neutrino and blazar TXS 0506+056 (IceCube): https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/press-r... 2022 NGC 1068 (Science): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... 2023 the Milky Way in neutrinos (IceCube): https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/press-r... If you want more of the universe explained simply, subscribe. What would you want to see with a neutrino telescope? #NobelPrize #Neutrino #IceCube