STOCKHOLM (AFP) — French scientist Albert Fert and his German counterpart Peter Gruenberg won the Nobel Physics Prize Tuesday for pioneering work that led to the miniaturised hard disk, one of the breakthroughs of modern information technology.
Fert, 69 and Gruenberg, 68, were lauded for their discovery in 1988 of a principle called giant magnetoresistance, or GMR.
GMR can "be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.
Consistently diminishing electronic devices have become a matter of course in today's IT world, with smaller laptop computers and MP3 digital music players hitting the market every year.
Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from compact hard disks.
The first read-out head based on Fert and Gruenberg's technology was launched in 1997, and has been the standard in industry since then. More than 700 million hard drives pour off production lines each year as a result of the duo's work.
Gruenberg told Swedish Radio that winning the prize was "overwhelming, it is just great."
But he said his work was slow to catch on.
"In the beginning, German firms did not take much notice of the invention," Gruenberg told reporters at the research centre in the western German town of Juelich where he works.
"But that has changed. It is extremely satisfying to see that it is being used."
Fert told AFP that "the discovery of GMR has had results that have gone way beyond what I expected."
Working independently, Fert and Gruenberg discovered that minute magnetic changes, in materials made of very thin layers of various metallic elements, lead to huge differences in electrical resistance.
In turn, these differences lead to changes in the current in the readout head, which scans a hard disk to spot the ones and zeroes in which the data is stored.
As a result, the readout head is able to read smaller and weaker magnetic areas -- and this sensitivity means information can be packed more densely on the hard disk.
Matin Durrani, editor of Physics World, a journal published by Britain's Institute of Physics, said the award was fitting.
"Most people draw up short lists (of potential winners) for fun -- of course we don't know who will win -- and they are two people we suspected might win it," Durrani said.
"I am really pleased that it has gone for something very practically based and rooted in research relevant to industry. It shows that physics has a real relevance not just to understanding natural phenomena but to real products in everyday life."
The pair have already been honoured together for their discovery. In January 2007, they shared the prestigious Japan Prize.
Fert is a professor at the Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, France and director of the Unite mixte de physique CNRS/Thales in Orsay, while Gruenberg is a professor at Germany's Forschungszentrum Juelich.
Last year, the Physics Prize went to US space scientists John Mather and George Smoot for a pioneering space mission which supports the "Big Bang" theory about the origins of the Universe.
The 2007 laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million dollars, 1.08 million euros) to be split between them.
The formal prize ceremony will be held as tradition dictates on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prize's creator, Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel.
On Monday, the Nobel Medicine Prize went to Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies of the United States and Martin Evans of Britain for their work in creating "knockout mice," or genetically manipulated mice that replicate human disease.
The chemistry prize will be announced on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The peace prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.
- The Nobel Foundation: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2007/
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