SWEDEN:France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Grünberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that revolutionised data storage and allowed the development of devices such as laptops and iPods.
The 10-million Swedish crown (€1.1 million) prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognised the pair's discovery of giant magnetoresistance, which enables scientists to push huge amounts of data into ever-smaller spaces.
"It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturise hard disks so radically in recent years," the academy said.
Giant magnetoresistance - GMR for short - works through a large electrical response to a tiny magnetic input. When atoms are laid down on a hard disk in ultra-thin layers, they interact differently from when they are spread out. This makes it possible to pack more data on disks. Numerous handheld devices - from mobile phones to music players - owe their existence to the discovery.
Surrounded by journalists in Paris soon after learning of his award, the 69-year-old Fert started chatting with some youngsters near the research centre he co-founded.
"You like physics?" he asked, telling them he had just won the Nobel prize. "If you are able to listen to music on your MP3 player, it is a bit thanks to what I've done." Fert and Grünberg (68) figured out how to stack nanometre-thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic atoms to produce the GMR effect.
"The story of the GMR effect is a very good demonstration of how a totally unexpected scientific discovery can give rise to completely new technologies and commercial products," the Nobel committee wrote.
It works because of a property called spin. Electrons - the charged particles within atoms - "spin" in different directions under various circumstances, producing the changes in resistance that are used to store data.
"It is the thing that has made iPods possible and anything that requires lots of data storage, like YouTube," said Chris Marrows, a physicist at Leeds University who specialises in "spintronics".
Fert and Grünberg each made the discovery independently of the other. They shared the 2007 Japan Prize for their work.
As Nobel physics laureates, Fert and Grünberg join the ranks of some of the greatest names in science, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr and Wilhelm Rontgen