Scientist who hunts mysterious ghost particles in the Antarctic ice wins Nobel Prize for physics

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Belgian-born scientist Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that researchers believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.“It was a great surprise, and I obviously didn’t expect it,” Halzen said, speaking to the Nobel Physics Committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference to announce the winner.Halzen said it was predicted that he would win the prize, but the announcement still made him feel “strange.”“I am working on a proposal, and I hope that this prize will help getting it approved,” he said to chuckles from the audience.Halzen paved the way for a new kind of astronomyNeutrinos are tiny cosmic particles with no electric charge and extraordinarily small mass, making them difficult to detect. Yet they are everywhere: They spew from stars like the sun, and trillions zip through our bodies every second.Scientists cannot glimpse the mysterious ghost particles zooming 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 to improve their odds of catching collisions.Halzen had the idea to turn the vast Antarctic ice into such a detector.

The Nobel committee said his work was instrumental to the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, which glimpsed the first high-energy neutrinos from faraway galaxies.“This experiment in the Antarctic is a revolutionary way of understanding the universe that we didn’t have before,” said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer for the American Institute of Physics.When a neutrino interacts with ice in the detector, it produces a flash of light that’s picked up by sensors. The transparent ice makes it easier for scientists to pick up on faint signals from the mysterious ghost particles, and the sensors are buried about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) deep to protect against interference from cosmic rays and radiation.Neutrinos can help scientists understand the universeThe 82-year-old scientist is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the U.S., which operates the observatory. Efforts by The Associated Press to reach him were not immediately successful.“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” the university's int…

Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved. Halzen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States, first presented his idea for capturing neutrino traces at the South Pole in 1988, but the project was not completed until 2011. Belgian-born scientist Francis Halzen has won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that offer clues about how the universe evolved.