Physics Nobel Prize to Hard Drive Technology Pioneers

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded two men who discovered Giant Magnetoresistance effect in 1988. Albert Fert from France and Peter Grunberg from Germany have discovered GMR separately each from other.

This breakthrough permitted to create hard drives with much more density of information on the disks. Although Fert and Grunberg oppend GMR in 1988 there was no hard drives working on that effect till 1997.

The GMR effect was discovered thanks to new techniques developed during the 1970s to produce very thin layers of different materials. If GMR is to work, structures consisting of layers that are only a few atoms thick have to be produced. For this reason GMR can also be considered one of the first real applications of nanotechnology.

Technorati Tags: GMR , Giant Magnetoresistance Effect , Nobel Prize , Albert Fert , Peter Grunberg