'This is the peak of all prizes'
| The Ottawa Citizen; with files from Citizen News Services |
The young German physicist at Carleton University in the early 1970s struck his colleagues as serious, methodical and hardworking -- though also an affable young guy who liked skating on the Rideau Canal.
But nothing prepared the Carleton community for Peter Grunberg's biggest coup 35 years later: Yesterday, he won a Nobel Prize for physics.
"It feels great," Mr. Grunberg said of the announcement. "The development of computers showed in the last years that this was an important contribution."
Without his work, you might not have a small-but-mighty laptop computer, or a tiny MP3 player crammed with music.
Mr. Grunberg won half the prize. He and a French scientist named Albert Fert share the Nobel for their work in reading vast amounts of data from small discs.
The two men independently came up with the same idea, known today as giant magnetoresistance (GMR), both in 1988. That means they will share the glory, and its prize of about $1.5 million.
Reaction spread fast.
"You're kidding!" shouted David Boal, a professor at Simon Fraser University who studied at Carleton with Mr. Grunberg. "I'm stunned! Well, fantastic for him!"
It took Mr. Boal a moment to absorb the news and choose the right words.
"We wrote maybe two or three (scientific) papers together. Really competent experimentalist. Sort of understated guy. That's why I'm saying 'You're kidding,' because he doesn't fit the personality that you think of, of some overbearing guy, really ambitious. ...
"He's just really thorough, a joy to work with. A scientist's scientist, so to speak, really focused on what he's doing."
Mr. Grunberg was at Carleton from 1969 to 1972 as a postdoctoral fellow -- a new PhD holder still under a senior researcher's supervision, with funding from the National Research Council.
His boss at Carleton was a chemical physics professor (now retired) named J. A. Koningstein, who, by coincidence, is in the Netherlands and was on his way to see his former student when the news broke.
"We were working then in lasers," he recalls. The task was to use a laser to excite an ion in crystals, and to study the very small steps by which the ion switches to a higher level of energy.
He remembers his former postdoc as thorough, methodical, but also "informal for a German."
(In fact, Mr. Grunberg was born in Pilsen, then part of Czechoslovakia, but raised mainly in Germany after the Second World War.)
In Ottawa, he also enjoyed parties with co-workers, and skating on the canal. Friends think they remember him skiing in the Gatineau Hills, too.
His early Carleton research is not directly connected to the Nobel work, which came when Mr. Grunberg left Ottawa for the job that would take up most of his career at the Institute of Solid State Research at Research Centre Jülich, in Germany.
Now, about the discovery.
The two physicists discovered that very small changes in a magnetic field can cause much larger changes in electrical current.
This means that a very small disc can store huge amounts of data, each requiring only a very tiny magnetic area. Then, when a reader scans over the disc, it registers changes in electric current, which form a digital code. This system allows miniature devices to hold a lot of data.
It took until 1997 for this system to be used commercially, but it has since spread into many devices.
The Nobel committee says the discovery was "one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology."
Nanotechnology is the use of very small pieces of matter, often just a molecule or two, to do some sort of machine-like work. The Grunberg system uses super-thin layers of different magnetic materials.
It adds: "Applications of this phenomenon have revolutionized techniques for retrieving data from hard discs. The discovery also plays a major role in various magnetic sensors as well as for the development of a new generation of electronics."
"In terms of industrial applications, this (field) is very big," Mr. Boal added.
Here is how Mr. Grunberg explained his reaction when told the traditional half-hour before the announcement that he had won: He said the voice on the phone was faint. He strained to understand.
"When I heard the word, 'Stockholm,' I thought, 'That's it! I have won the prize!'
"I was overwhelmed. This is the peak of all prizes."
