Physicists win Nobel Prize for new disk technology

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Two scientists were yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering a totally new physical effect that is being used to increase the storage capacity of hard disk drives.

In 1988 physicists, Albert Fert at Unité Mixte de Physique at the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France and Peter Grünberg, working at Jülich research centre in Germany, each independently discovered giant magnetoresistance (GMR).

They realised that very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system and that a system of this kind would be ideal for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current.

Since then, researchers and engineers have developed nanotechnology to exploit GMR properties in hard disk drive read-out heads that has become standard and been developed further by hard disk manufacturers to store data much more densely than before.

In its citation, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which administers the Nobel Prize, said the GMR effect was discovered thanks to new techniques developed during the 1970s to produce very thin layers of different materials. For GMR to work, structures consisting of layers that are only a few atoms thick have to be produced. "For this reason GMR can also be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology," it said.

The GMR effect replaced earlier technology of induction coils as read-out heads in hard drives. Induction coils are still used to write data on the disk. IBM is now looking to apply GMR technology to tape storage and MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory), memory that stores data bits using magnetic charges.

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