A Triumph For Hard Drive Technology
October 9th, 2007I caught this significant bit of news on MPR while driving home today - the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg of the Forschungszentrum in Jülich, Germany, for their discovery of the phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR).
GMR was coincidentally and independently discovered by the two physicists in 1988, which rapidly led to the science of spin-based electronics, or ‘spintronics‘. Spin-valve GMR is the physical phenomenon that makes gigabyte hard drives a reality today, and the prospect of Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) more promising.
According to this Ars Technica article:
While the GMR phenomenon was only discovered 20 years ago, it has already found many practical applications, mainly in the read heads used in high density computer storage. Other uses are still in the development phase; nonvolatile, low-power, high-density magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is based on GMR materials may be the successor to DRAM that is found in most PCs today. The applications of this technology are still in their infancy, but some suggest that materials that exploit this phenomenon could eventually lead us to practical optical or quantum computers.
