What is Peter Grünberg known for?
I am best known for discovering the giant magnetoresistance effect, or GMR, in 1988. This was a completely unexpected finding while I was studying magnetic multilayers—thin films of iron and chromium stacked like a sandwich. GMR is a large change in electrical resistance when a magnetic field is applied, and it turned out to be the key to reading data in hard drives. The beauty of physics is in the details: we were just curious about what would happen when we layered these materials, and the experiment spoke clearly. For this work, I shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics with Albert Fert, who independently discovered GMR around the same time. It was a lucky accident, but we were prepared to recognize it.
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