Winning a Nobel Prize is a matter of great prestige. Winning a Nobel Prize also means the award going to a small number of people while a large number are left out, even if they really deserved to win.
Alfred Nobel’s will said nothing about the number of people that can be awarded at one time but the Nobel Foundation’s statutes limit each prize to at most three people at a time, and no one that has died by the time a prize is announced. Learned reported the idea of using Antarctica’s ice mass as the target in which neutrinos from outer space could interact with atoms together. Also, scientists need to have been nominated by nominators who have their own eligibility criteria. Another author of this paper, Ernst Bamberg, had supervised Nagel’s PhD and was part of the team that established the importance of ChR2. But even if this rule did not exist, it is hard to say why the committee picked Halzen alone. Learned then focused on an underwater neutrino experiment called DUMAND while Halzen pursued a project that eventually became IceCube. The data quickly snowballed into evidence proving that neutrinos could be energised significantly by natural phenomena in space — and the prize citation credits this feat to Halzen alone. The physics prize for Halzen is not misplaced. Halzen was very good — but the point is so were very many others. Aside from the scientists named here, it also required engineers and technicians who could build it in one of the most hostile locations on our planet. And all these people had to work together to make the project and its subsequent achievements possible. Halzen alone could never have done it.
In 1988, Halzen and (today) University of Hawai’i physics and astronomy professor John G. Also, in 2012, while searching IceCube data for neutrinos coming from outer space with very high energies, scientists found two candidate events. Furthermore, the 2013 Science paper that reported the high-energy neutrinos also named three scientists named Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn as its corresponding authors.
Because of the prizes’ rules, this is partly.
A page on the website of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Germany, where Bamberg is now an emeritus professor, says he was instrumental in translating the ChR2 finding into practical applications.
But IceCube is an international collaboration involving around 450 experts from 58 institutions in 14 countries. But in real-life (as opposed to Nobel-life), the IceCube collaboration had credited Japanese physicist Aya Ishihara with finding those two candidate events, and for which she received an International Union of Pure and Applied Physics award in 2013. Next, the physics prize — which this year demonstrated the brokenness of the Nobel Prizes on a whole other level. This particular oversight is oddly reminiscent of the infamous Jocelyn Bell Burnell story . Ishihara is currently a professor at Chiba University, where she continues to study high-energy neutrinos and develop the next generation of neutrino detectors.
Francis Halzen won the prize all by himself “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”.
