President’s Distinguished Visiting Speaker Series

Speaker: Albert Fert, Nobel Laureate (Physics, 2007)
Monday, February 25
5:15 p.m. (coffee and tea will be served from 4:45 p.m.)
Auditorium (building 20)

Albert Fert, UMP CNRS/Thales, Palaiseau and Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, will speak on spin electronics, or spintronics as it is often described, as a new type of electronics exploiting the influence of the orientation of the electron spin on the electrical conduction. The starting point was the discovery of the “giant magnetoresistance” (GMR), a property of magnetic multilayers that is used today to read the hard disc of our computer and has led to a large increase of the capacity of the discs. Nowadays, spintronics is developing along many novel directions with a promising perspective of applications, short term applications for next generations of computers or telephones and, in a longer term, devices to go beyond the limits of conventional semiconductor-based electronics.

After an introduction on the fundamentals of spintronics, a review of some of the most interesting emerging research directions will be described, such as the spin transfer phenomena that will be applied soon in new types of non-volatile memories called STT-RAM (with a significant reduction of the energy consumption in computers) and also to devices for radio-wave generation in telecommunications. Spintronics with carbon-based materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes is foreseen to be the basis of new types of logic circuits in the beyond-silicon perspective. The study of neuromorphic devices for bio-inspired computing is another exciting novel direction of research that will be discussed.

About the President’s Distinguished Visiting Speaker Series
The President’s Distinguished Visiting Speaker Series features lectures by internationally eminent researchers renowned for their leading-edge interdisciplinary research.

About Albert Fert
Albert Fert graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, earned his PhD at the University of Paris in 1970 and became Professor of Physics at University Paris-Sud in 1976. He is today Scientific Director of a joint laboratory of CNRS and the Thales company, Emeritus Professor at University Paris-Sud, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

The experimental (and theoretical) research of Professor Fert is in condensed matter physics (electronic and magnetic properties of solids, spintronics). He co-discovered Giant Magnetoresistance in 1988, a phenomenon well known for its application to hard discs and the resulting large increase in their storage capacity. This discovery triggered the development of an important research field called ‘spintronics’, sometimes defined as a new type of electronics harnessing the spin of the electrons. Professor Fert and his team have made significant contributions to the development of spintronics, in particular through works on the theory of spin transport (Valet-Fert model) and experiments on spin dependent tunneling, generation of microwaves by spin transfer, Spin Hall Effect, and spin transport in carbon nanotubes or graphene.

Nobel Prize and Other Awards and Honors of Albert Fert

• Co-recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Grünberg (2007)
• International Prize for New Materials of the American Physical Society (1994)
• Magnetism Award of IUPAP (1994)
• Grand Prix de Physique Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society (1994)
• Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society (1997)
• Gold Medal of the French National Scientific Research Center, CNRS (2003)
• Japan Prize (2007)
• Honoris Causa Doctorate of a dozen of universities