2007 Physics Nobel Prize For Giant Magnetoresistance

A number of readers made sure we are aware that the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for simultaneously and independently discovering giant magnetoresistance. This property has allowed the explosion of disk-space growth and is cited as being one of the first nanotechnology breakthroughs. From the announcement: "Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current."

Due to my screenwrap...

[ackthpt (218170)]

I first read the title as 2007 Physics Nobel Prize For Giant and thought "cool!"

Onward ->

A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current."

Just as it seems we're about to move away from purely Mechanical Memory [slashdot.org] we find ways to make it better.

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[flyingsquid (813711)]

Honestly, I don't see the practical implications. OK, great, giants can now resist Magneto. But how many mutants are also giants? I mean I guess Colossus is pretty large so maybe he would count, but basically the majority of the X-men are just as powerless against him as before.

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[Amouth (879122)]

damn - and i already used my mod points for today

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[kf6auf (719514)]

Just as it seems we're about to move away from purely Mechanical Memory [slashdot.org] we find ways to make it better.

The development of spintronics allows many things, not just the hard drive read heads we've all had for the last 10 years. There are a couple of problems with flash, and if researchers can get the sizes down, these can be fixed with MRAM, magnetic memory based on spintronics again.

Also, these are the applications we know about; as with any branch of physics, you have to give the physicists more than 20 years to figure out the physics, and then give the engineers some more time to explore what they can

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[samkass (174571)]

This argument doesn't make sense to me, as flash chips are selling at much higher quantities than hard disks already. Flash MP3 players and embedded devices are everywhere, and the margins on flash manufacturing aren't that high. I suspect prices are being driven down as fast as technology is allowing them to, and that building more products based on them will only drive prices higher as supply outstrips demand.

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[tlhIngan (30335)]

This argument doesn't make sense to me, as flash chips are selling at much higher quantities than hard disks already. Flash MP3 players and embedded devices are everywhere, and the margins on flash manufacturing aren't that high. I suspect prices are being driven down as fast as technology is allowing them to, and that building more products based on them will only drive prices higher as supply outstrips demand.

Yes, right now there's a problem on the supply side. It turns out that Apple is one of the larges

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[Foerstner (931398)]

If you think about it, Apple is really hard on suppliers - think of them as the Wal-Mart of the computer industry. If they can get a part cheaper, they'll bully their suppliers to get it. Thus, it's really in the supplier's interest to find better ways of making the chips cheaper. 8GB chips are already here, and 16GB ones are going to be commercially available shortly, but still, it's a tight market.

The MP3 player industry, maybe. In the PC market, Apple doesn't have the buying power to squeeze its supplier

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[tlhIngan (30335)]

The MP3 player industry, maybe. In the PC market, Apple doesn't have the buying power to squeeze its suppliers. When Apple demanded faster-cheaper PowerPCs from IBM threatening to take its then-2% market share elsewhere, Big Blue could barely stop laughing long enough to tell Steve Jobs to take a hike.

Actually, while that is true, the reality is, Apple buys parts in huge quantities. Sure IBM could laugh them off, but think of their other customers as well - they have Microsoft, Sony/Toshiba and Nintendo as

Magnetoresistance

[by Anonymous Coward]

Personally I find Ian McKellan quite irresistible. (Sorry)

Pr0n

[graviplana (1160181)]

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices of nerds suddenly cried out in joy..."

thanks

[trybywrench (584843)]

thanks for making TB class storage available to the average consumer. High storage capacity has helped the digital music/video revolution come along. Thousands and thousands of songs stored on an average PC wouldn't be possible without advances like this.

Thanks... maybe

[camperdave (969942)]

thanks for making TB class storage available to the average consumer.

Yes... Pity it's still a shock sensitive, slow, electromechanical device rather than a high speed, rugged, solid state removable cartridge. Seriously, though, isn't it time we started moving away from mechanical storage?

Re:Thanks... maybe

[fm6 (162816)]

We've been moving away from mechanical storage for 60 years, ever since the first real computer appeared. Things have gotten less and less mechanical ever since then. But it's a slow, incremental process. Old tech doesn't just disappear because somebody invented something kewler. The new tech has to make an economic case for itself. I'd love to replace my hard disks with something solid state. But it has to be affordable and reliable. The closest thing we have is flash RAM, and that's not practical for anything bigger than a couple of gigabytes. And even then, I wouldn't rely on it for mission-critical data.

Technology and economics aside, a paradigm shift would be helpful. As the OLPC's XO demonstrates, you can easily build a useful computer that doesn't have a hard disk. It just won't run all the bloatware that we're all so dependent on. OLPC's second-biggest accomplishment might be to force everyone to rethink the way our overpowered computers are designed.

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[imsabbel (611519)]

Shut up with your useless drivel.

Of _course_ you can build a computer without a HD. You can even build a computer without any kind of flash AND hd. Just put something on a floppy, and boot from it.

What uses space nowadays aint "bloatware", but the increase in media.

Yeah, back in the days you could get a few seconds of sampled sound. Later you got pictures. Later you got videos. Then 3D-Scenes.

Modern storage requirement isnt dictated by inefficient programming, but by the amount of media needed to be stored.

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[fm6 (162816)]

Uh, do you have a point? I mean beyond, "You're an idiot and I have a headache." I think you need to unplug, unwind, and come back when you're sane.

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[MtViewGuy (197597)]

Interesting you mention that because one thing cited on the Nobel Prize announcement was it made it possible to put high capacity storage on a small device. That was what made the original iPod possible in the first place and why the iPod classic now can store an amazing 160 GB of media data, more data storage capacity than most desktop machine hard drives of just even a few years ago! :-O

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[Dr. Spork (142693)]

Yeah, seriously! I think that cheap, huge disks are the #1 reason that's driving a continued interest in filesharing. It's not that there's more bandwidth and interest. It's just that millions of people have giant file collections that they share, and ever more space to make them more giant. It not only increases demand, but also huge increases in the supply. That's all about cheap hard drives. I had a good friend fifteen years ago with hundreds of records - an incredible collection by standards of the day

RIAA lawsuit

[PMBjornerud (947233)]

RIAA lawsuit in 3.. 2.. 1..

oblig.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

Surely the prize for Magneto resistance should go to Professor Charles Xavier?

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[SlowMovingTarget (550823)]

Under the "obligatory" heading...

I, for one, welcome our new, magnetoresistant giant overlords.

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[Kingrames (858416)]

Unfortunately, in order to accept the award, he would have to have gone up a flight of stairs.

Secret of Giant Magneto resistance

[digitaldc (879047)]

I found that the secret was just a thin film structure... [wiw.org]

FYI: Nobel prize $ amounts this year...

[thatseattleguy (897282)]

...are set at $10M SEK (Swedish Kroner) - about $1.5M USD or $1.1M Euros, split between the winners equally. Not sure how this compares to previous years.

So in the end, each scientist nets about $750K USD, unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere.

/tsg/

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[reverseengineer (580922)]

The cash grant amounts associated with the Nobel Prizes have an interesting history- the foundation wasn't granted tax-exempt status until 1946, so for some of its early years, the tax assessment on the fund exceeded the total worth of that year's prizes. That, combined with orginally very conservative investment rules, caused the nominal value of the cash grants to stagnate, and the real value against inflation to plummet.

After getting tax-exempt status and easing their investment rules, the fund began

Patent?

[grumpyman (849537)]

Did anybody patent this technology?

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[thanasakis (225405)]

From the wikipedia article:

GMR was independently discovered in 1988 in Fe/Cr/Fe trilayers by a research team led by Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Centre, who owns the patent

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[Deadstick (535032)]

Sit down, Darl.

rj

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[grumpyman (849537)]

Is this technology being used in current drives? The reason I asked is because I wonder how this "patent" relates to the $100 500GB drives that we can buy these days.

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[Ochu (877326)]

What do you mean, "patent"? Look, I know the copyleft movement, and most of Slashdot, are against software and business patents, and it is true that most of the world's patent offices really need tightening up. But that doesn't mean a patent can't be very real, and very deserved. These researchers laboured for years to crack this, and after they did, they managed to find a genuine practical application for a piece of groundbreaking new science. And you would deny them the right to get paid for it? To answer

compare this to string theory and cosmology

[dario_moreno (263767)]

Just compare the achievements of those two geniuses with the recent discussion about the crackpots speculating about the metrics of the universe. Here we have a real, old-fashioned Nobel Prize : a simple and brilliant idea, an experimental demonstration, and practical applications, like in the 1900s were you had to demonstrate the effect in front of the Academy of Sciences in order to get the prize or even to get your paper published, look at the online lessons from the time (Lippman for instance). As a professor of physics I was on the commitee of a conference aimed at high school teachers about modern days physics. I suggested the teachers in charge invited Fert but they answered that they do not understand a single thing about spin and ironically enough they wanted conferences about string theory and particle physics instead : there is definitely something wrong with public outreach of science, astrophysicists and particle physicists having built PR machines on the scale of their accelerators, observatories and budgets, and grabbing a huge part of the grants, when, with the same budget than the CERN spent on condensed matter physics or (relatively) small budget experiments maybe we would have a thousand of discoveries like the one of Fert. I bet that in CERN maybe a physicist in a thousand, with an IQ over 200, sees the big picture and understands what the wotk is really about. Atomic, molecular or condensed state physics, fluid mechanics, soft matter physics, are much more tractable and practical with real challenges (high-TC supraconductivity...) Admiteddly the Web came out of CERN but still...

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[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

This is hardly two guys working in thier basements. These [wikipedia.org] guys [wikipedia.org] (the institutions the winners are from) are clearly not doing small budget science. But I do agree with you that too much "national capital equipment" science is done at the expense of more modest goals.

Nah, it's just a scheduling thing

[hawk (1151)]

Don't believe that; it's really about scheduling on the hard drive.

It's an algorithm to deal with competing requests. The german portion of the algorithm attempts to write everywhere immediately, while the french portion hides behind a bad sector and then surrenders . . . :)

hawk

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[Lord Ender (156273)]

So quit whining and start your own PR machine to stimulate public interest in funding your area of research. Do you really need equipment as expensive as a particle accelerator to continue your research?

Re:compare this to string theory and cosmology

[Ambitwistor (1041236)]

If you want to equate the importance of physics with technological applications, fine, but that's not the only reason to do physics. Learning about the fundamental building blocks of the universe has intellectual merit of its own, and face it, a lot of ordinary people are really interested what physicists learn about such things. You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't be interested in particle physics or whatever, just because condensed matter is more practical. That's a value judgement.

By the way, it's a fallacy to think that if not for Big Particle Physics, condensed matter physics would be enormously more fruitful. If the money wasn't going to accelerators, that doesn't mean it would be going to condensed matter physicists instead; it might just go to biologists.

And just dumping money on condensed matter doesn't guarantee breakthroughs. There are already far more condensed matter physicists than particle physicists; if you try to buy even more of them, you're necessarily going to start scraping the bottom of the talent barrel, and you get diminishing returns. Unless you're arguing that the money should go to existing condensed matter physicists without expanding the talent pool, to fund work that they currently can't afford to do. Well, I don't buy that either: the guys most likely to make breakthroughs are almost certainly already well funded.

Disclosure: I did my PhD in condensed matter.

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[rasputin465 (1032646)]

I bet that in CERN maybe a physicist in a thousand, with an IQ over 200, sees the big picture and understands what the wotk is really about.

That's highly unlikely. If you are a prof. of physics, as you claim, then you know very well what it takes to obtain a Ph.D., and one of the most basic requirements is the ability to demonstrate a very complete understanding of the relevant field and the "big picture" as you put it. And that's just for the degree; there's no WAY someone could get a faculty appointmen

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[dario_moreno (263767)]

there is understanding and understanding. There is a difference in between aligning the correct buzzwords in approximately the correct order (as many string theorists do) and producing a grand unified theory of quantum gravitation and of the other forces -at nonzero temperature of course- , for which one should have the brains of the lovechild of Einstein, Newton, Poincaré and a good dozen of mathematicians. Besides you actually defend my point : much research in physics on scales varying between the

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[bjorniac (836863)]

You're right. And that silly speed of light is the same in all reference frames, what a crazy idea. It'll never have a practical application right?

In theoretical physics what we do is... theoretical. Get used to it. Oh, and conflating CERN and cosmology so much makes me seriously doubt your credentials. Most string theorists have a budget of their own salary plus a few grad students/post docs. CERN is largely examining the standard model (looking for a Higgs boson, for example) which is an incredibly well t

Not everybody will be amused

[rrohbeck (944847)]

The MPAA/RIAA must hate those guys.

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[ScrewMaster (602015)]

On the other hand, they were perfectly happy when we couldn't just jam 10,000 songs and a few dozen movies into a small device that fits in a pocket. They're no particular fan of cheap storage, believe me. It's not a matter of what they can or can't do to you, it's the fact that a low cost per bit made it really easy for people acquire vast collections of media. That does piss them off, bigtime ... if those assholes were running the show back then, we'd all be using 5.25" floppies.

Interesting analogy

[Vainglorious Coward (267452)]

The BBC coverage of this story [bbc.co.uk] has a nice analogy :

equivalent to a jet flying at a speed of 30,000 kmph, at a height of just one metre above the ground, and yet being able to see and catalogue every single blade of grass it passes over

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[Deadstick (535032)]

How much is that in VW Beetles per football field?

rj

from theory to practice

[patfla (967983)]

These were the guys who discovered the effect. And I suppose they deserve Nobel prizes of it.

But it was IBM's Almaden Research Lab - and a lot of blood, sweat, toil and materials science - that turned GMR into a commercial reality.

And then, some yrs later, IBM turned around and sold its whole disk drive division to Hitachi.

But I imagine they did so with something more than a gleam in their eye. And I doubt that gleam was flash memory.

Disk drives have become another brutal low/no margin business. In fact

alternative meaning

[Muhammar (659468)]

Giant magnetoresistance = Superconducting cryogenically-cooled defensive shield erected by giant pandas - designed to scramble our cell phones and credit cards, and to prevent us from encroaching on their habitat

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

As you say, you really don't understand.

The Nobel committee gives prizes not based on whether it benefits the average prole, but whether it advanced the knowledge of physics, chemistry and so on.

BTW: it does benefit you, unless you don't use a sizeable hard drive. The huge hard drives that are available lately are because of this discovery.

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[jpflip (670957)]

This has actually been a component of nearly every computer for many years. IBM apparently introduced the first commercial GMR-based hard drive in late 1997, a 16.8 Gigabyte model that at the time was among the largest commercially available. Pretty much any gigabyte-scale drive, and so essentially all drives available today, use GMR heads.

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[Spy der Mann (805235)]

The Nobel committee gives prizes not based on whether it benefits the average prole, but whether it advanced the knowledge of physics, chemistry and so on.

I agree with you on a 50%. See,
Smaller storage => lesser energy consumption => more trees saved => benefits for all mankind.

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[IthnkImParanoid (410494)]

If we wanted to save trees we could just stop burning them to run our hard drives.

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[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Probably because this discovery is considered the birth of spintronics. [wikipedia.org]

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[zappepcs (820751)]

I am killing myself laughing.... \ I guess that tag thing gets removed when posting, even in text mode... there was supposed to be an end sarcasm tag at the end of My first comment... sigh

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[fbjon (692006)]

Nothing new there: nobody understands Vista.

The Vista source code will probably get the 2007 literature Nobel prize, "for its narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the failures of mankind."