Albert fert biography

French physicist Albert Fert shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics – along with several other awards including the Wolf Prize and Japan Prize – with Peter Grünberg for their independent but almost simultaneous discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) in 1988.

The phenomenon is a quantum effect based on the influence of the orientation of the electron spins on the electrical conduction in nanostructures based on magnetic metals.

Albert fert biography wikipedia

The discovery is recognized as the birth of spintronics, a research field often described as a new type of electronics exploiting not only the electric charge of the electrons but also their magnetism (their spin). Spintronics became rapidly an important field of research with a great potential of applications in the Technologies of Information and Communication.

GMR itself boosted the capacity of information storage in hard drives. Hard disks store information in minute magnetic parcels, which are then read and decoded into t