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5 min readThe Nobel winner searching for deep-space neutrinos in Antarctica
Francis Halzen, now a Nobel laureate in physics, once told Ira Flatow that his team named their first two detected neutrinos after Sesame Street characters. Bert and Ernie. The next really energetic one would be Big Bird. This was in 2013, years before the prize, when Halzen was still figuring out what to do with the telescope he had spent two decades building a mile beneath the Antarctic ice.
What neutrinos are and why they matter
Neutrinos are elementary particles with no electric charge, first discovered in 1956. They travel at nearly the speed of light and have a tiny mass. In most ways they behave like light—they form beams, they move in straight lines—except for one crucial difference: they go through walls. They go through the Earth. They go through your body. They go through the detector built to catch them. "It's only occasionally that you can catch one," Halzen said. "And that's why you have to build this big device."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:38) **Introduction to the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory** - Ira introduces the concept of a telescope built a mile deep in Antarctic ice to detect elusive neutrinos.
- 2 (02:42) **What Are Neutrinos?** - Halzen defines neutrinos as another form of light, elementary particles with no electric charge that make beams like light.
- 3 (03:55) **Why Build a Mile Deep in Ice?** - Halzen explains the need to shield the detector from cosmic rays that would impersonate neutrinos.
- 4 (05:15) **Neutrino Properties** - Halzen describes neutrinos as tiny, nearly massless particles that travel at the speed of light and go through everything.
- 5 (06:11) **Why Go Through All This Trouble?** - Halzen reveals his primary motivation as a particle physicist: the challenge of building the detector itself.
- 6 (07:19) **High-Energy Neutrinos from Space** - Halzen explains that neutrinos detected by Ice Cube have about a thousand times the energy of any produced by accelerators.
- 7 (08:17) **Neutrinos and Dark Matter** - Halzen clarifies that neutrinos are not dark energy, an idea that was ruled out 20 years ago.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
It’s Nobel Prize week, and this year's prize in physics went to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” The IceCube is a massive neutrino detector that covers a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and looks for high-energy neutrinos coming from deep space.
In 2013, Ira spoke with physicist Francis Halzen about the decision to build the IceCube at the South Pole and the challenges of constructing a map of the cosmos with neutrinos.
Guest:
Dr. Francis Halzen is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the 2026 recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.
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