Albert Fert
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of the Giant magnetoresistive effect which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. He is currently professor at University Paris-Sud in Orsay and scientific director of the Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales.
In 1988 he discovered the Giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR) in multilayers of iron and chromium which is recognized as the birth of spintronics (GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Peter Grünberg from the Jülich Research Center). Since 1988, Albert Fert made outstanding contributions to the field of spintronics as recognized by a number of shared international prizes [APS International Prize for New Materials (1994), International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award (1994), Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1997), Japan Prize (2007), Wolf Prize (2007) ]. At a national level, he received the Grand prix de physique Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society, the 2003 CNRS Gold Medal, and was elected at the French Academy of Sciences in 2004.
