 Albert Fert Professor, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France. Born in 1938. Photo: © CNRS Photolibrary – C. Lebedinsky
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 Peter Grünberg Professor, Institut für Festkörperforschung, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Born in 1939. Photo: © Forschungszentrum Jülich
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A small magnetic change can make a major difference to an electrical current. This is the basis of a responsive sensor that uses giant magnetoresistance. This effect opened the door for a completely new development in electronics, spintronics, and has in the last decade revolutionized techniques for scanning data on hard disks.
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Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg discovered the phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance simultaneously but independently in 1988. Albert Fert and his colleagues created thirty or so magnetic layers sandwiched between non-magnetic material and showed that the influence of an external magnetic field had a major effect on resistance. The group’s first research article coined the concept of giant magnetoresistance. Peter Grünberg’s group saw the same effect when a layer of non-magnetic material was sandwiched between two layers of magnetic material, which is the structure used today in read-out heads.
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