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."

Comments

Due to my screenwrap...

[ackthpt]

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 we find ways to make it better.

Re:Due to my screenwrap...

[flyingsquid]

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.

Re:Due to my screenwrap...

[tlhIngan]

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 largest customers of flash memory (with all the iPods...), enough so that if anyone supplying Apple sneezes, prices go up. Flash memory prices are already on their way up in anticipation of Apple's increased demand for the holiday season, in fact (which is around now for production). (This is for the large single chip NAND flash - 1GB+)

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.

Memory technology has moved to the latest and greatest processes already (no, not 65nm... that's old tech. 35nm for memory is the standard nowadays). Problem is, spinning platters improvements have come about far faster than Moore's law. Heck, there was a time when tape was considerably cheaper (cost per megabyte/GB) than a hard disk, but those days have more or less gone (reserved for those who can afford the ultra expensive systems with TB's of space, where it may be cheaper still, but the initial startup costs are prohibitive for normal people).

Re:Due to my screenwrap...

[kf6auf]

Just as it seems we're about to move away from purely Mechanical Memory 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 do with it. It takes this at least this long to truly understand the impact, but this is not really what the Nobel Prize is for (it was even originally meant to be awarded in the same year as the research is done, but it's very difficult to fully comprehend just how much of an effect a discovery will have in less than a year (though the 1987 prize for high-Tc superconductivity is an exception).

By giving the Nobel Prize now, they're saying "This has sparked a huge amount of research into a field you discovered and you deserve that credit." It is practically impossible to work in the field and not recognize these guys.

Magnetoresistance

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I find Ian McKellan quite irresistible. (Sorry)

Pr0n

[graviplana]

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

thanks

[trybywrench]

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.

oblig.

[Rob T Firefly]

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

Re:Huh? I don't understand

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

FYI: Nobel prize $ amounts this year...

[thatseattleguy]

...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/

Re:FYI: Nobel prize $ amounts this year...

[reverseengineer]

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 to grow exponentially, and in both nominal and real terms, the current monetary award is larger than it's ever been. Here is a listing and chart of how that amount has changed over time.

Thanks... maybe

[camperdave]

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]

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.

Re:Huh? I don't understand

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Probably because this discovery is considered the birth of spintronics.

Patent?

[grumpyman]

Did anybody patent this technology?

compare this to string theory and cosmology

[dario_moreno]

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...

Re:compare this to string theory and cosmology

[Ambitwistor]

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.

Re:compare this to string theory and cosmology

[rasputin465]

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 appointment without that level of understanding.

It's very true that accelerator-based particle physics is coming to a dead end. But I think the suggestion that particle physicists get to play with huge budgets simply because of better PR is unfounded. In general, condensed matter research simply doesn't require huge budgets. Cutting-edge CM research can still be done in a one-room laboratory these days, with a crew of less than ten. Believe you me, the huge budgets of CERN and Fermilab are hinderances more than blessings, because it takes much more time and people to make a breakthrough. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that pure research is worthless because it is not so "tractable and practical". For example, let's not forget that the development of quantum mechanics was completely untractable and unpractical, but without it, all the transistors you rely on to read this posting wouldn't exist...

Oh, and please leave string theory out of this. Most people in our field don't even consider that real science.

Not everybody will be amused

[rrohbeck]

The MPAA/RIAA must hate those guys.

Interesting analogy

[Vainglorious Coward]

The BBC coverage of this story 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

from theory to practice

[patfla]

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 they've been that way for a long time. You can come up with something new like Toshiba's first 1" drive that made the first iPods possible. But even those drives commanded a premium for some finite period of time.

It's history maybe quite a few people don't know, but IBM invented RAM (aka DRAM). Randomly accessible memory. Prior to that, you actually had to sequentially read your way through main memory to find what you wanted. Something in the way tape drives used to work, and possibly still work (don't spend a lot of time keeping up on tape drive technology).

And it (RAM) cost (I think) something like $1 bln in 1970 dollars.