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Peter Andreas Grünberg (German pronunciation: [ˈpeːtɐ ˈɡʁyːnbɛʁk] ⓘ; 18 May 1939 – 7 April 2018 [1] [2] [3]) was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.
Peter A. Grünberg (PAG) at the age of 33 when he started his work at the research centre in Jülich. In 1972, I was offered a position as a research scientist at the newly founded Institute for Magnetism at the research centre in Jülich.
Peter Grünberg was a Czech-born German scientist who, with Albert Fert, received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent codiscovery of giant magnetoresistance.
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Peter Grünberg was one of the first physicists to understand the potential of nascent nanotechnologies for fundamental research. He discovered giant magnetoresistance, or GMR: a large change in electrical resistance induced by a small magnetic field in stacks of ultrathin magnetic and non-magnetic layers. For this, he won a share of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics (as did I; we independently discovered the same effect). Ultimately, his work led to the development of hard-disk drives and greatly increased data storage. It also kicked off the field of spintronics. Grünberg died on 7 April 2018, aged 78.
Grünberg was born in 1939 in Pilsen, Bohemia, then a German protectorate, now part of the Czech Republic. In 1945, his family left for West Germany. There, at 19, Grünberg went to study physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt; he then did a PhD at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
For his PhD, he used optical spectroscopy to determine the energy levels of rare-earth ions in magnetic garnet crystals. In his postdoc, he turned another spectroscopy technique — Raman scattering — on garnets, this time at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, from 1969 to 1971. And in 1972, thanks to his expertise in the spectroscopic study of magnetic materials, Grünberg was offered a post at the newly founded Institute for Magnetism at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany.
Here, Grünberg quickly demonstrated his pioneering spirit, developing the spectroscopy technique of Brillouin light-scattering spectroscopy (BLS). BLS examines the inelastic scattering of light; it can probe both the ground state of magnetic materials and their excited states. In the 1970s, physicists were struggling to pick up the specific excitation modes expected to occur at the surface of magnetic materials. Grünberg singled out these modes, and identified them as spin waves of the Damon–Eshbach type.
During a sabbatical at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in 1985, Grünberg used an emerging technique of growing metals on single crystals to extend his BLS experiments to layers of magnetic materials less than 1 nanometre thick. This led to his first major discovery. In a sandwich of magnetic iron, non-magnetic chromium and more iron, he and his co-workers demonstrated the existence of antiferromagnetic exchange coupling between the iron layers across chromium (P. Grünberg et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 2442; 1986). This was the first demonstration of a quantum effect in magnetism. The coupling results from the interference between electronic wave functions reflected at the surface of the magnetic layers. For me, it was also the revelation of a nanostructure in which I could test some of my own ideas about magnetoresistance.
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- Albert Fert
- 2018
Apr 9, 2018 · Peter Grünberg. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2007. Born: 18 May 1939, Plzen, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) Died: 9 April 2018, Jülich, Germany. Affiliation at the time of the award: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany. Prize motivation: “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”. Prize share: 1/2.
About Peter Grünberg. Prof. Dr. Peter Grünberg's Curriculum Vitae. Peter Grünberg, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, dedicated his expertise to pushing the boundaries of fundamental research in information technology.
Apr 12, 2018 · Peter Grünberg, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who discovered how to store vast amounts of data by manipulating the magnetic and electrical fields of thin layers of atoms, making possible...
