Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing IceCube, a large experiment built to catch neutrinos arriving from far beyond our solar system. The detector is anchored at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the American research outpost on the Antarctic continent, where it has turned the frozen ice into a giant scientific instrument.
The detector spreads across one square kilometer of Antarctic ice. Eighty-six strings are lowered more than a mile into the ice, and each string carries sixty sensors. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything, but when one collides with a molecule in the ice it produces a faint blue flash, and the sensors record these flashes so scientists can trace where the particle came from.
The team logged 28 such events between May 2010 and 2012. The results were published in the journal Science in November 2013, marking an early milestone for the project. The effort cost about $271 million and took roughly a decade to complete, with the final string installed in December 2010.
Building the array was not straightforward. Deployment moved at about sixteen strings per austral summer, the short Antarctic season when work is possible. At one point a machine used to bundle the cables broke down, and the crew had no working fix on hand. The workaround was simple: masking tape, applied to each string in the field.
Credit. Based on reporting by Richard Panek for The Last Word On Nothing. Is this your work? Write to us.
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