Kayla DeHolton, University of Mississippi assistant professor of physics and astronomy, visits the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where she is part of an international team of researchers studying neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Submitted photo
New professor offers students chance to work on Antarctic neutrino observatory.
by Clara Turnage
Kayla DeHolton has had a busy fall. She began her first faculty position at the University of Mississippi in August. Then, in October, she learned that her work helped support this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
DeHolton, Ole Miss assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is a member of the international team of researchers working on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a collaboration whose work was recognized by the 2026 Nobel Prize, awarded to Francis Halzen.
“It’s a great relief for me to finally deliver the recognition that this great collaboration deserves,” said Halzen, IceCube’s principal investigator. “This was a great surprise and is a celebration of a very unusual project.
“The success of this project involved the diligence and hard work of the many wonderful collaborators I’ve had the pleasure to work with.”
The IceCube collaboration seeks to understand one of the most elusive and abundant particles in the universe, the neutrino.
Sometimes called the “ghost particle,” a neutrino is at least 1 million times lighter than an electron. They are created in high-energy environments such as blazars, the cores of stars and supernovas.
“Everything that we have learned about neutrinos just keeps making them weirder and weirder,” DeHolton said. “More than a billion pass through your thumbnail every single second, and yet they very rarely interact with matter.”
To study them, the IceCube collaboration created a particle detector embedded in Antarctic ice buried nearly a mile and a half beneath the surface near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The detector allows researchers to trace the trajectory of neutrinos passing through Earth, giving them an idea of where the cosmic messengers came from.
“Neutrinos are emitted from our sun, and those are very abundant, but they also have much lower energy than the ones we are most interested in, which originate outside of the Milky Way,” DeHolton said. “Since neutrinos don’t interact with matter, they travel uninterrupted in a straight line for very long distances.
“When these high-energy neutrinos interact in the detector, they can produce a bright path of light. We can trace that line backwards to figure out where it came from.”
Understanding where neutrinos come from can tell physicists about high-energy areas in galaxies outside our own.
“Neutrinos function like little cosmic messengers, and understanding them helps us understand what’s happening inside galaxies,” she said.
Besides using neutrinos for astronomy, IceCube also studies the properties of the neutrino particles.
“That’s one of the most interesting things about fundamental physics: We have no idea what these particles are going to tell us or do for us or what we might be able to use them for, in the future,” she said. “The more that we can learn about these particles, the more that we learn about the universe .”
DeHolton is continuing work on IceCube and is working with other physicists on the recently deployed IceCube Upgrade. This next-generation detector will significantly improve IceCube’s capabilities.
Ole Miss students can be a part of that project, she said.
“I look forward to working with undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs on IceCube,” she said. “One of the reasons I was drawn to the group at Ole Miss is because the physics department really emphasizes both particle physics and multimessenger astronomy and this project and my work really bridge the two.
“I felt like my work would fit here, and I’m really excited to bring IceCube to the university.”
Having DeHolton in the high-energy physics group will benefit students across the department, said Breese Quinn, director of the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.
“Kayla is exactly the kind of stellar candidate that we want building their career here,” he said. “Ever since Jim Reidy started the high-energy group, the goal has been for it to just keep growing and becoming bigger and offering better opportunities for our students.
“Kayla is going to help us do that.”
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