What do you do after winning the Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering a technology that has touched billions of lives? You might take it easy or, if you are Albert Fert, you would try to come up with a completely new spin on that technology – which could find its way into billions of mobile phones and other communications devices.
Fert shared the 2007 prize for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance – if you store lots of multimedia on your computer, he is the one person you should thank. In this interview, he tells us what he is up to in his lab at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay and also how his prize-winning research was picked up and commercialized by IBM into highly sensitive read heads for hard drives.
