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  • Hacker News
  • Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
    by yk
  • The first time in as long as I can think that a single physicist was chosen.
    by cgeier
  • We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:

    There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.

    by weinzierl
  • I worked with a guy who worked on IceCube. He flew down to the South Pole, went all the way to the station, just to install debian for their data processing systems. I was... a bit jealous.
    by dekhn
  • What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/
    by southpolesteve
  • I'm in love with the cute little figure that came with the press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026/10/fig_fy_26_3x2.jpg

    I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!

    by JimTheMan
  • He receives the prize for conceiving the IceCube neutrino detector, a cubic-kilometer-sized detecter in the Antarctics.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

    Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)

    This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

    by _Microft
  • A breakdown of why the awarded work, Ice Cube, is significant:

      - A neutrino is an elementary subatomic particle. Neutrinos are produced by nuclear reactions inside stars, supernovae, radioactive decay. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe.
  - Neutrinos are known as "ghost particles". They have 0 charge and near-zero mass. They only react with the weak nuclear force and gravity. Incredibly hard to detect. Trillions can pass through a whole planet without hitting a single atom!
  - Neutrinos give us a pristine snapshot into the origin of the universe. They have travelled billions of years and trillions of miles without interacting with anything. Unless...we catch them!
  - Ice Cube does this. Located in Antarctica, the project turns a cubic kilometer of ice into a neutrino detector. How? Scientists drilled boreholes 2.5km deep into the ice and placed 5000 optical detectors to catch a neutrino interaction.
  - When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light. This produces something similar to a sonic boom. A faint, blue glow known as Cherenkov radiation (see it in action https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSuSG19Pcoc).
  - IceCube was first to detect neutrinos coming from outside the solar system, establishing the source of high energy cosmic radiation. It also opened a whole new chapter of neutrino astronomy.
    by hazrmard

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