Nobel winners' discovery led to your iPod
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday honored two scientists whose discovery revolutionized digital data storage, awarding the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics for work that allows millions to sway to music on their iPods and to store a lifetime's photographs on palm-size devices.
Peter Gruenberg of Germany and Albert Fert of France were recognized for their independent discovery of giant magnetoresistance – an exotic phenomenon whose practical applications became ubiquitous in everyday life in less than two decades.
Among the results: The palm-size external hard drive that can hold a good chunk of your local library. The iPod that allows you to carry a thousand songs in your pocket. The computing revolution that allows your laptop to hold more information than a 19th-century warehouse.
Gruenberg and others credited American Stuart Parkin at IBM's research labs in San Jose for translating the European scientists' research into practical applications. Some had expected Parkin to share the Nobel with Fert and Gruenberg.
"We have high expectations, and we are disappointed he was not considered with the other two, but the award was given for the raw discovery, and they did that," said Mark Dean, Parkin's boss and vice president for research at IBM.
Made science practical
"We are very proud of Stuart," Dean added. "We believe he was the key to identifying the materials and structures that made this understanding of the science practical. . . . Without his work, we would not be sitting here with the capacities we have today."
"The raw understanding of how nature works is a great thing," Dean added. "The application of that knowing how nature works in the creation of something my mother can use is another great breakthrough – and as significant."
The Europeans will share about $1.5 million, a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars in wealth they have helped create in Silicon Valley and around the world.
"It feels great," Gruenberg said in an interview after he won the prize. As usual, Nobel Prize winners were alerted Tuesday half an hour ahead of the rest of the world by the academy in Stockholm. When the call came, Gruenberg said, the voice on the other end of the line was extremely faint. He strained to understand what he was being told.
"When I heard the word, 'Stockholm,' I thought, 'That's it! I have won the prize!' " he recalled. Gruenberg and Fert had long been tipped to become Nobelists.
Their discovery that ultra-thin slices of metal have different electrical properties in a magnetic field not only changed the musical and computing habits of the entire planet but also altered the very landscape of how people think about information, and the ways in which music, movies and ideas can be shared.
Packing information into ever-more-compact spaces is at the heart of the success of devices such as the iPod. That success would have been impossible without the scientific discovery honored Tuesday.
The phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, is one of those ideas that seems impossible until someone shows how it can be done, and then it seems obvious. Hundreds of laboratories and companies today are expanding on Fert's and Gruenberg's idea, with results more striking than anything they had originally visualized.
Scientists such as Xiaoguang Zhang, a senior researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, described that original discovery as path-breaking.
"It really freed the minds of physicists," Zhang said.
Although giant magnetoresistance does sound a bit like one of those mutants in the "X-Men" movie series, it actually describes a phenomenon at the junction of electricity and magnetism: When two layers of a metal such as iron are separated by a thin layer of another metal such as chromium, the application of a magnetic field can change the resistance of the structure – which determines how much electricity will flow through it.
Data in computer hard drives and iPod players is magnetically stored. Computer manufacturers have built GMR devices that "read" this data: As the mechanical reader "head" using GMR technology moves over the data, the magnetic field alters the resistance within the head, thereby controlling the flow of electricity. This in turn is translated into the ones and zeroes of digital information that processors turn into images, music or vast databases.
Without giant magnetoresistance, a lot of information still could be packed into a tiny space, but it would be unreadable. Effectively, GMR technology provides a sort of magnifying glass that allows electronic devices to read very tiny letters.
Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of the school of engineering at Harvard University and a professor of physics, said Fert's and Gruenberg's discovery had led to a wide range of applications. "If you can change the electrical properties of materials, that has important implications for a whole bunch of applications," he said.
Fert, 69, is a professor at the University of Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France. Born in Carcassonne, France, he is married and has two children. Gruenberg, 68, was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic. Now a German citizen, he works at the Institute of Solid State Research, which is part of a scientific facility known as Research Center Juelich in western Germany. He is married and has three children.