Nobel laureate to inaugurate new KTH research centre
On Friday 7 December Albert Fert, one of this year´s Nobel Prize winners, will inaugurate the new Centre of Excellence on Spintronics here at KTH. Its research effort will focus on new raw materials and components that will enable more efficient storage of various data and communications. This is also the subject area addressed by Prof. Fert, jointly with Prof. Peter Grünberg, who is sharing with him the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in recognition of their discoveries.
Our new Centre is a joint project between KTH, Vinnova and NM Spintronics company, with a budget of 6 MSEK allocated for each year of the first three-year period. The target is to develop materials pertaining to the discoveries made in the field of spintronics, which the two KTH professors Venkat Rao and Börje Johansson presented a few years ago.
– During the inital stage, the spintronics part will act as a kind of ”integrated turbo-charging” of existing electronics och electro-optics, explains Bo Wikström, CEO at NM Spintronics, founded in 2003 for the commercialisation of this new knowledge. It will then gradually replace a lot of conventional electronics, and also add new and better functions. As an extra bonus in the process, we´ll enjoy both energy savings and less environmental impact, for instance reduced emissions of carbon dioxide!
Albert Fert, 69, is a Frenchman, since 1976 holding a professorial Chair at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay. Together with Professor Peter Grünberg from Germany, he is the 2007 Physics laureate for his discovery of the so-called Giant Magneto Resistance, GMR. This is an entirely new type of technology – a kind of magnetic communication and information exchange. Its application into portable computers has already been of the very greatest importance to the Western world.
During the festivities at the KTH Centre of Excellence on Spintronics a number of speeches will be delivered, notably by our new President Peter Gudmundson, Director-General Per Eriksson from Vinnova, University Chancellor Anders Flodström and CEO Bo Wikström of NM Spintronics.
Magnus Myrén