Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison won the physics prize for his role in building the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos originating from beyond the solar system. IceCube is a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice near the South Pole threaded with light sensors, completed in 2011. Within two years, it had detected high-energy cosmic neutrinos, which scientists then used to trace a particle back to a blazar in 2018 and to build the first map of the Milky Way made from neutrino data in 2023.

The physiology or medicine prize went to Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg for their work founding optogenetics, a technique that uses light-sensitive proteins to control neurons. Hegemann and Nagel identified channelrhodopsin in the eye spot of the green alga Chlamydomonas; Deisseroth showed the technique's power by inserting the channelrhodopsin gene into rat nerve cells and using blue light to control the movement of a mouse's whiskers. Abdel El Manira of the Karolinska Institute said the technology lets scientists link specific neural circuits to specific behaviors. Optogenetics is now applied to research on depression, schizophrenia, dementia, anxiety, addiction, and the potential restoration of sight.

Henri Kagan of the Université Paris-Saclay and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science shared the chemistry prize for work on chirality, the property by which some molecules exist as non-superimposable mirror images, like a left and right hand. Life on Earth is "homochiral": proteins, DNA, and RNA are built almost exclusively from one-handed versions of their molecules, a puzzle the laureates' work helped address. In 1986, Kagan reported that a chemical reaction could amplify a small imbalance between mirror-image forms, using a catalyst of imperfect purity to generate a product of higher purity. Soai later developed a chiral catalyst capable of forming itself, amplifying a starting imbalance of roughly 0.00005 percent into a 99.5 percent preference for a single molecular form.

The Nobel committee tied the research to the thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s, when the drug was sold as a 50:50 mixture of its two mirror-image forms and caused more than 10,000 birth defects across Europe, Canada, and Australia. The committee also cited ibuprofen, developed by Boots in the 1960s, which contains an active S-form and an inactive R-form that the body partially converts into the active one, and L-DOPA, the Parkinson's disease treatment that must be in its L-form to cross the blood-brain barrier. William Knowles solved the challenge of producing that form using chiral catalysts in the 1970s while at Monsanto, work that earned him the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Researchers are now exploring chirality for uses including circularly polarized light displays, anti-counterfeiting security tags, and quantum electronics.