Men behind iPod technology get Physics Nobel

Stockholm: Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics for their work with nanotechnology, the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday.

The prestigious 10 million Swedish crown prize recognised the pair's work which has allowed the radical miniaturisation of hard disks.

This was the second of this year's crop of Nobel prizes, which are handed out annually for achievements in science, literature, economics and peace.

The prizes bearing the name of Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of the Swedish dynamite millionaire.

But the prize, one of the original five outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel, is one of the toughest to predict, and in some cases, comprehend, given the complexity of science involved for an award with a wide latitude of subjects to touch on.

"Physics is a tough one," David Pendlebury, of research services at Thomson Scientific, which analyzes the work, citations and experience of scores of possible Nobel laureates and conducts an online poll to see who the likely winners could be said earlier in the day.

"We have a real challenge which is to make a prediction and assume or hope or something that these few people will win it that year," he said. The company predicted that the winners of this year's medicine prize would win, but last year. "What happens is we have picked people who go on in subsequent years to win the Nobel Prize."

This year, Thomson Scientific singled out Sumio Iijima, a Japanese scientist from Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, for his work in nanoscience; British cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin J. Rees, for his work studying cosmic microwave background radiation and how galaxies form; and Canadian Arthur B. McDonald and Tokyo's Yoji Totsuka for their work on solar and atmospheric neutrinos.

Others tipped as contenders included Polish-born Alexander Wolszczan, Canadian Dale Frail and Switzerland's Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery and documentation of planets that orbit stars outside of a solar system.

(With inputs from AP and Reuters)

<table width="248" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="2"> <tr bgcolor="#AE111D"> <td height="20" valign="middle" bgcolor="#DB1524"><div align="center"><strong class="Wtext11">Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics for work that has allowed hard disks to be made much smaller for everything from laptops to iPods. Here are some facts about the technology:</strong></div></td> </tr> <tr bgcolor="#e7e7e7"> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" />The prize was awarded for work on magnetoelectronics, also known as spintronics.</td> </tr> <tr> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" />It uses the spin of the electron to store and transport information instead of the electrical charge, meaning much more information could be kept in a smaller space than before.</td> </tr> <tr> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" /> Fert and Gruenberg made independent discoveries of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon, considered the birth of spintronics, in the late 1980s.</td> </tr> <tr> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" /> They found weak magnetic fields force large changes in electrical resistance. That allows the conversion of data stored magnetically into electric signals the computer can read.</td> </tr> <tr> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" />The technology allowed the development of handheld devices such as iPod music players and mobile phones with lots of functions.</td> </tr> <tr> <td width="248" height="20" valign="middle" class="Btext11 pLeft10"><img src="/pix/common/bullet.gif" width="7" height="7" alt="bullet" /> The remaining parties have around 67,647 votes. </td> </tr></table>

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