Nobel 2026 Lab · Physics
Every light pulse from the real data, as it reached the sensors in the ice
On 8 December 2016, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole recorded a shower with an energy of 6.05 ± 0.72 PeV.
That is close to the energy of the Glashow resonance: an electron antineutrino hits an electron and forms a W− boson, with a peak at an antineutrino energy of 6.3 PeV. The event is consistent with the Glashow resonance.
Sheldon Glashow first proposed this resonance in 1960.
How to read it: each faint dot is one of the 5,160 sensors on 86 strings. A sensor lights up when its first light arrives; its colour shows when (red first, then yellow, green and blue) and its size grows with the logarithm of the light it has collected so far. The 17 µs of the event are slowed down to 12 seconds, slowest at the start, where most of the light arrives; the clock shows the real time.