Effect that Revolutionized Hard Drives Nets a Nobel

摘要

If you work at a computer, play video games, or listen to music on an iPod, you've benefited directly from the efforts of the winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Albert Fert of France's national research agency, CNRS, in Orsay, France, and Peter Griinberg of the Julich Research Center in Germany independently discovered an effect known as giant magnetore-sistance (GMR) that fueled a dramatic increase in the capacity of computer hard drives. The discovery also laid the cornerstone of a new field known as spintronics, in which researchers try to exploit the fact that electrons spin like little tops to make novel devices.