The 2007 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to a pair of European scientists who discovered a tiny magnetic effect that has revolutionized the storage of computerized information.
France’s Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg of Germany independently discovered giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, in 1988. The manipulation of weakly magnetized films of atoms allows iPods, computers and other digital devices to store vast amounts of information on ever-smaller hard disks.
“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard-drive industry,” said Phil Schewe, a spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. “Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”
Fert, 69, is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France. He told television crews outside his Paris office that the basic research “is rooted in work that I started a very long time ago. But the discovery of GMR has had results that have gone way beyond what I expected.”
A former rugby player and current sailboarder, Fert said he was looking forward to escaping the attention and having a quiet celebration with family and friends. “Champagne is already on the table,” he said.
Gruenberg, 67, a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in Juelich, Germany, said he received the call from Stockholm early Tuesday.
“I was overwhelmed,” he said. “This is the peak of all prizes.”
Fert and Gruenberg will share the $1.5 million prize money.
The award broke a seven-year streak of American victories that began in 2000. In that period, 20 people were honored for work they did at American laboratories and universities.
Geraldine Baum in Paris contributed to this report.
