In Brief with Albert Fert, Nobel Laureate
By David Terraso
Nov 18, 2011 | Atlanta
Renowned physicist Albert Fert was in Atlanta last month as part of the “France-Atlanta 2011 – Together Toward Innovation” series, designed to explore how partners from these two regions can work together to answer the biggest questions in science, economics, architecture and other cultural realms.
During his visit, he gave his talk, “Spintronics: Electrons, Spins, Computers and Telephones” to a group of students and faculty at the Marcus Nanotechnology center. He was kind enough to sit for a brief interview beforehand.
Why I Should Care: Albert Fert is one of the recipients of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of giant magnetoresistance in 1988. This discovery lead to a breakthrough in the development of hard drives, allowing for them to be made smaller – leading to the hard drives found in today’s iPhones and laptops.
He is currently an emeritus professor at Université Paris-Sud and the scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Thales group. He is collaborating with Walt de Heer and Claire Berger from Georgia Tech on research involving spintronics and graphene.
David Terraso: What is spintronics and why is it important?
Albert Fert: Sometimes it’s said that spintronics is a new type of electronics that exploits not only the charge, but also the spin of the electrons.
This has opened new potentialities, for example you use over there in your computer one of the spintronics effect, which is called giant magnetoresistance to read the hard disk of your computer.
DT: Tell me about the spintronics work your doing in graphene with researchers from Georgia Tech.
AF: Graphene has unique properties for spintronics in that it can transport spin-polarized currents at much longer distances than any other material. With metals and silicon you can transport electrons for one micron, but graphene allows for transport of about 100 microns without losing the polarization of the spin.
DT: Why is graphene such an exciting material to work with in regards to spintronics?
AF: In several devices you need to transport spin currents over longer distances, graphene allows this. There are other properties too that make it worthwhile such as the flexibility of the electronic properties and the ability to tune its electronic properties. Also, graphene is so thin that it can be affected strongly by other atoms on the surface.
DT: Is there anything that you wanted to add?
AF: I think that physics is even more attractive for me than it was at the beginning of my career, because now we have so wonderful tools for nanotechnologies that help us, wonderful tools to prepare and fabricate structures on the nanoscale. And with all these tools we can give some power to our imagination. You can imagine something in your mind and we will have the tools to fabricate the structure.
