French scientist Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance, the Nobel committee announced Tuesday.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation that their contribution "can also be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology."
In 1988, Fert and Gruenberg independently discovered a physical effect known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR. This effect has led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks. And that sensitivity lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.
"Applications of this phenomenon have revolutionized techniques for retrieving data from hard disks," the academy said.
"The discovery also plays a major role in various magnetic sensors as well as for the development of a new generation of electronics."
Their discovery has made it possible to miniaturize hard disks and has enabled computer users to quickly and easily store reams of data on computer hard drives.
Fert, 69, is a professor at the Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and director of the Unite mixte de physique CNRS in Orsay, while Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany.
This was the second of this year's crop of Nobel prizes, which are handed out annually for achievements in science, literature, economics and peace.
On Monday, the Nobel Medicine Prize went to Briton Martin J. Evans and Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies for their groundbreaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals.
The winners of the Chemistry Prize will be announced Wednesday, to be followed by those for Literature Thursday, Peace Friday and Economics next Monday.
The annual Nobel Prizes are usually announced in October and are handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.
Nobel died childless and dedicated his vast fortune to create "prizes for those, who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
The prizes have been awarded since 1901. Each prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor(1.53 million U.S. dollars).
Source: Xinhua
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