Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the fathers of hard disks

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for their discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR, a physical effect that gave the impulse to the development of technologies for read-out heads used in hard disks for computers.

This year's physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.