In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Francis Halzen, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin and principal investigator for the IceCube Project. Halzen describes his involvement in the origins of the project in 1990, and he recounts his childhood in Belgium and the ordeals his family experienced during World War II. He discusses his undergraduate and graduate education at Louvain University, and he describes his developing interests in group theory and quark theory. Halzen discusses his research on non-relativistic quarks bound in mesons under the direction of Frans Cerulus, and he describes his postdoctoral research at CERN on duality between resonances and particle exchanges. He discusses his subsequent work at Brookhaven and the initial goal of finding the W boson with the ISABELLE program, and he describes the events leading to his joining the faculty in Madison. Halzen describes the leading position Wisconsin enjoyed in high-energy physics, the transitional period he found himself in with the advent of QCD, and the importance of the research being conducted at Argonne, SLAC and Fermilab over the years. He describes the origins of the AMANDA project and he explains the relevance of building a kilometer cube detector for neutrino astronomy. Halzen discusses the complementary relationship between cosmic ray and particle physics, and he explains why the IceCube project needed to be as large as it is to detect the sources of cosmic rays. He explains why Antarctica is an ideal site to detect neutrinos and what it would take to create a standard neutrino model. Halzen describes the magnitude of the event if IceCube was able to detect a neutron start merger in neutrinos, gamma rays and gravitational waves, and at the end of the interview, he describes the future goals of IceCube and how it will continue to expand our understanding of the universe.
