Hard Disk Tech Earns Physics Nobel Prize

France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg have been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics work that has revolutionized hard disk storage.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics to France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Grünberg for their research into giant magnetoresistance&mdashGMR—which enables greater amounts of data to be packed into ever-smaller areas.

The two scientists discovered the phenomena independently of each other; they also shared the 2007 Japan Prize for their research.

GMR works by producing a disproportionately large electrical response to a very small magnetic input. The phenomena emerges due to the “spin” of electrons in atoms: the electrons can be made to spin in different directions in different circumstances, producing differences in electrical resistance which, in turn, can be used to represent digital data. Fert and Grünberg discovered ways to exploit the GMR effect using nanometer-thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic material are stacked together. The discovery was unexpected, but quickly applied to commercial applications like data storage, where it has enabled the production of ever-smaller (and ever-denser) hard drives: it’s no exaggeration to say the iPod—and notebook computers—wouldn’t exist without the efforts of Fert and Grünberg.

Fert and Grünberg independently discovered the GMR phenomena in 1988. By 1997, scientists were working on the first read-out heads for employing the technology in hard drives.

Fert and Grünberg will share a prize of 10 million Swedish krona (about $1.5 million U.S. dollars).