Like your iPod? Thank this year's physics Nobelists

hiake · Oct 10, 2007

Like your iPod? Thank this year's physics Nobelists

Getting the average person hooked on physics can pose something of a challenge. Black holes and multiple universes are an easy enough sell, but try the room temperature spin Hall effect on for size and you'll see what I mean.

Mercifully, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has seen fit to award this year's Nobel Prize for physics to a couple of guys who did something we can all appreciate: making it technologically feasible to cram a wall full of CDs onto a slick white gadget the size of a deck of cards and thereby revolutionizing the art of gazing blankly into somebody's armpit during the morning subway crush (at least in New York City).

Albert Fert of Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Gruenberg of Germany's Forschungszentrum Juelich will split the $1.5 million prize for their independent discovery 20 years ago of an effect called giant magnetoresistance, in which the current flowing across a sandwich of thin magnetic and conducting layers varies dramatically depending on the direction of a magnetic domain placed next to it. If that sounds like a familiar concept, it's because hard drives in everything from the laptop to the Wii console store data in precisely that form. Toggling a bit from 0 to 1 in a computer's memory is the same thing as switching the orientation of that bit's magnetic field.

By finding a vastly more sensitive way to distinguish those fields, which grow weaker as bits get smaller, Fert and Gruenberg paved the way for the high-density hard drives that brought us the iPod, digital video recording and the continuing gains in laptop and desktop memory. Our Reuters story (available for a few weeks) has a good quote:

"A computer hard disk reader that uses a GMR sensor is equivalent to a jet flying at a speed of 30,000 kilometers (19,500 miles) per hour ... at a height of just one meter above the ground, and yet being able to see and catalogue every single blade of grass it passes over," [Ben Murdin, a physics professor at the University of Surrey in southeast England] said.
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And sort of like a B-movie franchise, researchers keep uncovering new, more powerful forms of magnetoresistance: colossal magnetoresistance, ballistic magnetoresistance and (my personal favorite) extraordinary magnetoresistance, to name three.

Mere giant magnetoresistance, which debuted in commercial hard drives back in 1998, represented the first example of so-called spintronics, or electronics based not on charge but spin, the property of an electron that makes it act like a tiny bar magnet. Physicists have started thinking that more exotic magnetic effects (like that spin Hall effect mentioned above) might allow them to build quantum computers that run on spin.

This year's physics Nobel should remind us that the notion of uninterruptible technological progress embodied in Moore's law doesn't just happen by magic. It takes researchers like Fert and Gruenberg working today to keep those trends moving as each new decade rolls around.

Source: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=like_your_ipod_thank_this_year_s_physics&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
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I would have thought all those hard drives just pop into existence from non-existence. Never would have guessed that it involved intricate physics

/SARCASM

xiaojia · Oct 10, 2007

lol.. can't understand half of those physics the article was talking abt..

tree · Oct 10, 2007

=( =x =\ i dont understand too...........

kdotc · Oct 10, 2007

well allow me to explain this article to your physics nooob lol jks jks

anyways congrats..i love ipod

BigM · Oct 10, 2007

This wouldn't have just helped ipods, but would have helped anything that requires to store memory ie laptops.. Wow this sure is pretty cool how physics is implemented in technology

hiake · Oct 10, 2007

BigM said: ↑

This wouldn't have just helped ipods, but would have helped anything that requires to store memory ie laptops.. Wow this sure is pretty cool how physics is implemented in technology
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The technology practically opened the door to all kinds of possibilities in terms of computer storage (and in turn, functionalities and configuration)

Just that iPod took the idea a step further with "portable music player" before anyone even thought about it -tongue2

Like your iPod? Thank this year's physics Nobelists

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin

xiaojia Well-Known Member

tree Well-Known Member

kdotc 안녕하세요빅뱅K-Dragon입니다

BigM Well-Known Member

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin