This Year’s Nobel Prize Winners Are…

Celebrated after his death because he wished to empower us all to reach for something more, the Nobel Prize awards named after Alfred Nobel, are given out to those that excel or elevate human life on this planet. The award is given out annually to those in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and medicine, with the prize for economics added later in 1968. Those selected as winners of the prize are told before hand, usually in October, with the official ceremony taking place in December. This year’s Nobel Prize award for Physics goes to Albert Fert from France and Peter Gruenberg from Germany, for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance.

Albert Fert is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for physics at CNRS/Thales and professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. In 1962 after graduating from École normale supérieure in Paris, Fert got his master’s degree at the University of Paris and his PHD from Université Paris-Sud.

Peter Gruenberg is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in Juelich, Germany. He attained his diploma from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in 1962; at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany he got his diploma in physics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1969. From 1969 to 1972, he did postdoctoral work at Carleton University located in Ottawa, Canada. Joining the Institute for Solid State Physics at the Jülich, Research Centre, becoming a leading researcher in the field of thin film and multilayer magnetism until 2004 when he retired.

“These two men independently discovered Giant Magnetoresistance, a quantum mechanical effect, which allows for high capacity drives.”

These two men independently discovered Giant Magnetoresistance, a quantum mechanical effect, which allows for high capacity drives. To better explain, try to envision your old record player playing your favorite vinyl. The disc laying there on its own will not play, but needs the “head” in order to have the lines etched in the wax to be interpreted as sound. Now we can’t possibly put thousands of songs and movies or information of any type on vinyl, so special discs were created that leave a magnetic imprint, which more advanced heads can pick up by gliding gently over the disc without ever really touching it.

What was discovered is that electrons belonging to atoms in extremely thin layers of alternating metals, could pick up on these faint changes in magnetism and in a sense translate them into giant changes in electrical resistance. Meaning that the storage areas where the bytes of information are located, could be more densely packed together without losing any of the data, allowing computers to still pick up on them creating the ones and zeroes that computers read.

I know that this may seem like none consequential information, but without this breakthrough, the high capacity for today’s multi-gigabyte hard drives or your ipod would be minimal. So when you press play on your mp3 player or save a file on your computer, remember to say thank you to Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert. Now I’ll leave you with the final words of a great man, that created a forum for these two men to be celebrated and recognized.

“The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way:

The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical works by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.”- Alfred Nobel