Whodunit Wednesday: Francis Halzen

Do you know what ghost particles are? In English we would call them neutrinos, but in the common tongue in Dutch they are called “ghost particles” (as well as officially being called “neutrinos”). The Nobel Prize for Physics was recently awarded to Francis Halzen for his work at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole (Antarctica). It is here that neutrinos can be tracked and captured. 

Francis Halzen was born in Tienen, Belgium in 1944. He studied Physics in Leuven and worked for CERN from 1969-1971. After this he moved to the US where he has worked as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was here that he came up with the idea to build a giant detector for neutrino’s. This would have to be built in Antarctica because of the ice that was necessary to capture these particles that are everywhere and yet undetectable. 

Neutrinos pass through the Earth and our bodies every day. We just don’t notice it. Scientists for some time have figured that these particles exist, but it has been impossible to detect (and therefore to prove) them. In 1988 Halzen first presented his idea: when a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it releases a flash of light. This light can be tracked if there are sensors in glacial ice. IceCube is a full cubic kilometer of ice - designed to capture these particles. The first one was detected in 2011. 

Halzxen is only the second ever Belgian scientist presented with the Nobel Prize for Physics The other was François Englert in 2013.