What is Albert Fert known for?
I am best known for discovering giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, in 1988. This was a completely unexpected finding when we were studying magnetic multilayers—specifically, layers of iron and chromium. We observed that the electrical resistance of these structures dropped dramatically when a magnetic field was applied, far more than any known effect at the time. That's a very interesting point: the change was about 50% at room temperature, which was astonishing. This discovery became the foundation of spintronics, a field that uses both the charge and spin of electrons. GMR is now used in the read heads of virtually all hard disk drives, enabling the massive data storage we rely on today. It also earned me the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007, shared with Peter Grünberg, who independently observed a similar effect.
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