University of Alberta physicists hailed Francis Halzen’s 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics, celebrating the IceCube leader’s role in turning the Antarctic detector into a breakthrough neutrino observatory.
IceCube’s cubic-kilometer array of sensors buried in South Pole ice detects ultra-high-energy neutrinos, enabling discoveries of particles arriving from beyond the Milky Way and from regions near black holes.
The University of Alberta joined the collaboration soon after IceCube opened in 2011 and has since contributed faculty leadership, student deployments to the South Pole and work on data interpretation and detector operations.
Juan Pablo Yañez recently served as physics coordinator for the IceCube Upgrade, installed last winter, underscoring the university’s continuing role as the collaboration pursues further high-energy neutrino discoveries.