After 38 years drilling the South Pole's ice, Francis Halzen gets the call from Stockholm — physics' Nobel is his, SEK 12 million (about $1.2 million) and all

The phone rang at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Francis Halzen, 82, picked up to learn he'd won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics alone — the first sole winner since 1992 — for turning Antarctic ice into a telescope. His wild 1988 idea, that neutrinos from exploding stars and black holes could be caught as they flash through a cubic kilometre of frozen ice, grew into IceCube: more than 5,000 light sensors buried up to 2.5 km deep, run by 450+ researchers in 14 countries, which in 2013 captured the first high-energy neutrinos from beyond our solar system. 'This was an adventure where success was not guaranteed, but we overcame many challenges,' he said. 'It was a long journey.'