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Just a few days ago, I was in Sendai attending a seminar on Spintronics research. It was there that I met Nobel Laureate Peter Grünberg. He was among the keynote speakers we had at the seminar.

What do we know about Peter Grünberg?

He is a German physicist and shares the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) with Albert Fert. This discovery brought about a major breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives. If you’re using a computer right now, there’s a high probability that the hard disk you have there has a GMR read head.

The discovery of GMR also brought about a new field of research in “spin transport electronics”, also known as Spintronics. Any physicist or aspiring physicist out there reading this?

The title of his keynote was “Spintronics: Interlayer Exchange Coupling and Giant Magnetoresistance GMR”.

Spintronics is still very new to me. I’ll try my best to explain what it is.

Electrons as most of us would know, move freely in orbitals around the nucleus of an atom and carry a negative electrical charge.

What we did not know until recently, which in academic terms probably span 2-3 decades, was that electrons have an intrinsic spin. In other words, they rotate on an axis too. Very much like dear old Earth’s rotation, separating day and night.

If there’s rotation and an electrical current, the right hand rule you learnt in Physics 101 tells you that it produces a magnetic field.

You have electrons spinning on an axis as they moving around in orbitals around an atom’s nucleus. This produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field has a magnitude as well as a direction. A magnetic moment is what we use to measure that magnitude and direction of a magnetic field.

Instead of only using the fundamental charge of electrons to try to rule the world, Spintronics allows us to also exploit the intrinsic spin of electrons and its magnetic moment for our world domination plans.

If you didn’t get all that, an overly simplified and rough analogy would be the Earth’s rotation as it orbits the sun. The Earth has an electrical field, magnetic field and spin as well!

Who knows, Spintronics might actually bring about the age of Quantum Computing!

There are currently 5 Nobel Prize categories

Nobel Prize in Physics
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Peace Prize

So the million dollar question, how does one win the Nobel Prize?

Paraphrasing a healthy 70 year old scientist who has won it,

“You can’t aim to win the Nobel Prize. You just do good research, present at conferences and keep pushing the envelope. With a little bit of luck, your work will have far-reaching applications that will grab you the Nobel Prize”

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