The 2007 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to a pair of European scientists who discovered a tiny magnetic effect that has revolutionized the storage of computerized information.
Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discoveries of the phenomenon, which spurred some of computing’s most astonishing developments, from video-playing handheld devices to PCs whose storage capacity now seems all but limitless.
France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg independently described giant magnetoresistance in 1988, then saw the electronics industry apply it in disks with incredible amounts of storage.
“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry,” said Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. “Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”
Fert, 69, is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France, and Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in the west German city of Juelich. They will share the $1.5 million prize.
Giant magnetoresistance is a process by which a tiny magnetic field can trigger unexpectedly large changes in electrical resistance. These changes can then be read as stored information, which is the heart of modern computer hard-drive technology.
Fert and Gruenberg pioneered the process of stacking alternating thin layers of magnetic and nonmagnetic atoms to produce the GMR effect.
The first disk-reading device based on the effect was launched in 1997 “and this soon became the standard technology,” the Nobel committee said.
GMR does not deserve sole credit for recent improvements in data storage. For one thing, it’s not used in solid-state “flash” memory that has less capacity than hard drives. Fert joked about Tuesday, when he said his iPod, loaded with jazz, was busted.
“It’s my fault because I got an iPod with a GMR hard drive,” he said. “If I had an iPod with a simple flash memory, it wouldn’t be broken.”
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