When the Nobel Prize in Physics went to University of Wisconsin–Madison physicist Francis Halzen, the architect of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a young Turkish researcher was among the scientists working on the experiment in Madison. Emre Burak Yıldızcı is a graduate student in UW–Madison’s Department of Physics, where he joined in 2019 and works with professor Lu Lu.

According to his university profile, Yıldızcı’s research focuses on IceCube and the Pierre Auger Observatory, which studies the highest-energy cosmic rays.
Hunting cosmic neutrinos under the Antarctic ice

IceCube uses thousands of optical sensors buried deep in a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole to catch the faint flashes of light produced when neutrinos — nearly massless “ghost particles” — interact with the ice. Yıldızcı presented IceCube analyses at the 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference in 2025, including work characterizing the astrophysical neutrino flux with cascade events and measuring the all-flavor neutrino flux at PeV energies.

He is also among the authors of a 2024 study on improved modeling of particle showers in the ice for IceCube event reconstruction, published in the Journal of Instrumentation.