Nobel Prize Winner to Discuss Electronics Developments During UA Talk

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The 2007 Nobel Prize winner in physics will discuss recent electronics developments springing from the discovery for which he was awarded the prize during a March 7 talk hosted by The University of Alabama’s MINT Center and department of physics and astronomy.

Dr. Albert Fert, professor at the Université Paris-Sud in France, will present “The Present and Future of Spintronics” Friday, March 7 at 1:30 p.m. in 227 Gallalee Hall. Fert was awarded, along with Dr. Peter Gruenberg, the Nobel Prize in October for the 1988 discovery of a phenomenon that came to be known as Giant Magnetoresistance, or GMR.

Fert and Gruenberg’s discovery of GMR led to the rapid development of computer hard drives in the 1990s and to many of today’s high-tech gadgets. The discovery is recognized as the birth of a new field called spin electronics or spintronics. Spintronic devices are similar to electronic devices but unlike simple electronic devices, such as the transistor, spintronic devices use not only the electronic charge but also another property, the electron’s “spin.”

GMR allowed engineers to make sensors that could sense or “read” extremely tiny magnetized regions on a hard drive. This allowed manufacturers to pack many more bits of information into the same area. The results include less expensive hard drives, Ipods, TiVos, high capacity memory for digital cameras and more.

Fert’s talk will include an introduction to the fundamentals of spin dependent electronic conduction, GMR, and recent developments in spintronics. Fert is visiting UA for discussions with faculty of the UA Center for Materials for Information Technology, or MINT, about future collaborations on spintronics.

MINT focuses on developing new materials to advance data storage. GMR and related advancements are central to many areas in which MINT is focused. More than 30 faculty from seven academic programs comprise MINT. It was the first research program in the South designated as a National Science Foundation Materials Research and Engineering Center, known as MRSEC, when it achieved that designation in 1994.

MINT has won three NSF MRSEC grants. The latest research award was for $6 million. MINT’s corporate sponsors include IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, Maxell and Fujitsu.