Albert Fert


Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay and scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Thales Group. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.

Biography

Fert graduated in 1962 from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received his Ph.D. in 1963 and his Sc.D., both from the Orsay Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris.
In 1988, Albert Fert at Orsay in France and Peter Gruenberg in Jülich in Germany, simultaneously and independently, discovered the giant magnetoresistance of the magnetic multilayers. This discovery is recognized as the birth of spintronics, a research field which is often described as a new type of electronics exploiting not only the electric charge of the electrons but also their magnetism. Spintronics has already important applications. One knows that the introduction of GMR read heads in hard disks has led to a considerable increase of their capacity of information storage. Other spintronic properties are exploited in the M-RAM that are expected to impact soon the technology of the computers and phones. Albert Fert had many contributions to the development of spintronics and, after his 2007 Nobel Prize, he is exploring the emerging direction of the exploitation of topological properties in spintronics. His most recent works are on the topologically protected magnetic solitons called skyrmions and on the conversion between charge and spin current by topological insulators.

Honors and awards