ABSTRACT
What do Bert, Ernie, and Big Bird have to do with the Nobel Prize in Physics? These playful nicknames belong to three extraordinary neutrino events recorded by IceCube, a telescope embedded deep in the Antarctic ice. This talk explores the science behind the 2026 prize awarded to Francis Halzen, from the elusive nature of neutrinos to the challenge of detecting their faint signals in vast volumes of water and ice. We will follow IceCube’s discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and ask how these particles open a new window on the Universe. Finally, I will introduce the exceptionally energetic neutrino detected by KM3NeT in the Mediterranean Sea and discuss our recent work on using cosmic neutrinos to test new neutrino interactions.
BIOGRAPHY
Prof. Yiming Zhong received his Ph.D. at the Chen-Ning Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics of Stony Brook University in 2016. After that, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Boston University (2016--2019) and a KICP Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics of the University of Chicago (2019--2023). Since 2023, he has been an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Zhong's research area lies at the intersection of theoretical particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. He was awarded the KICP fellowship at UChicago in 2019 and the Simons Foundation International Grant in 2026. He was the Chinese translator of the popular science books "Time Reborn" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far".
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