Peter Grünberg

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Dr Peter Grünberg is a German physicist and one of the discoverers of the Giant magnetoresistive effect which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks.

Grünberg received his Ph.D. in 1969 from the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. He later joined the Institute for Solid State Physics at the Jülich Research Centre, where he became a leading researcher in the field of thin film and multilayer magnetism.

In 1986 he discovered the antiparallel exchange coupling ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin non-ferromagnetic layer, and in 1988 he discovered the Giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR) in multilayers couple in this fashion. GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Albert Fert from the Université de Paris Sud.

Grünberg's work has been rewarded with shared prizes in the APS International Prize for New Materials, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award, and the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize. He also won the prestigious German Future Prize for Technology and Innovation in 1998.