By Townhall Chicago News Staff
The Illinois Institute of Technology on Monday highlighted the work of two campus physicists whose research connects to the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Francis Halzen for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
The prize recognized the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources, opening a new method for studying the universe. The connection underscores the role of Chicago-area institutions in advancing scientific research at the highest levels.
“It’s like opening up a whole new window into studying the universe that we hadn’t had before,” Goni Halevi, Illinois Tech assistant teaching professor of physics, said in a university article published Monday.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that rarely interact with matter. Billions pass through the human body every second without leaving a trace. Unlike light, which can be scattered or absorbed, neutrinos travel vast distances without interference, preserving information about their origins, according to the Illinois Tech article.
The IceCube observatory, located at the South Pole, uses a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to detect these particles. When a high-energy neutrino collides with matter in the ice, it creates a flash of light that thousands of embedded sensors can detect.
The rarity of such interactions makes IceCube’s scale critical.
“For every billion, billion, billion neutrinos that pass through your detector, a single one might strike an atom in your detector and reveal itself with a flash of light,” Bryce Littlejohn, Illinois Tech associate professor of physics, said in the article.
Littlejohn’s research focuses on neutrino detection and improving how detectors measure particle interactions. Through experiments including MicroBooNE at Fermilab in suburban Batavia, he and collaborators investigate neutrino behavior and develop methods to extract more information from detector signals.
Halevi’s work centers on computational astrophysics. She uses simulations to model extreme events, including the collapse of massive stars into black holes. Observations from IceCube can provide data points that complement her simulations, she said.
“Combining all three of those windows would be really exciting,” Halevi said, referring to neutrinos, light and gravitational waves as tools for studying stellar explosions.
Halzen established the theoretical foundations for embedding neutrino detectors in ice decades before IceCube was built, then led the effort to construct the observatory.
“People always thought this was a cute idea, right? But it would never work,” Halzen said at a post-Nobel Prize news conference. “The greatest surprise is that we did make it work.”
Studying high-energy neutrinos could help physicists test the limits of existing theories about the universe’s fundamental building blocks. By observing how neutrinos behave at energies thousands of times higher than what particle accelerators such as Fermilab or CERN can produce, scientists can search for clues that current theories cannot explain, according to the article.
“The future looks bright for neutrino astronomy,” Littlejohn said. “IceCube has given rise to this next generation of neutrino telescopes.”
