2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for optical fibres and the CCD

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Charles K. Kao (50%) for "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication" and to Willard S. Boyle & George E. Smith (25% each) for "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

See nobelprize.org.
Nobel information on Twitter: twitter.com/Nobelprize_org

"Colossal" Magnetoresistance to further revolutionise storage

Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) revolutionised storage since its discovery some 20 years ago, winning the Nobel prize and allowing devices like the iPod to store massive amounts of data in tiny spaces. June 12th edition of Phys Rev Letters published a paper by Yang Ding and team of the Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Center (HPSync) describing a new approach yielding an effect 1000 times more powerful than GMR, dubbed Colossal Magnetoresistance (CMR).

The researchers found that when manganite was subjected to 230,000 times atmospheric pressure it underwent a transition from a ferromagnetic type (electron spins aligned) to an antiferromagnetic type (electron spins opposed). This transition was accompanied by a non-uniform structural Jahn-Teller effect distortion.

There's a long way to go before simple applications of the approach, but what were considered fundamental magnetic reading limits using magnetoresistance effects are again evaporating.

See Carnegie Institution for Science.

Nobel Laureate Weinberg to give public lecture

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg will give a public lecture on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009, 3:00 pm at Theatre A, Science Lecture Block, UCD on ‘The Craft of Science and the Craft of Art’.

2008 Nobel Prize in Physics breaks symmetry

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics relates to broken symmetry discoveries which led to the quark model.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with half to Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan and Toshihide Maskawa,Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

See Nobel Prize Announcement.

Climate Change campaign nets Gore the peace prize

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize goes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

See NobelPrize.org.

Nano effect wins 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics

In 1988 Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR, which was to revolutionise data storage technology that is used to read data on hard disks. With GMR it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the increasingly compact hard disks used in laptops, iPods and other ever-smaller devices.

GMR can be considered one of the first real applications of nanotechnology. ''The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,'' Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. ''You would not have an iPod without this effect.''

The two winners split the 10M SEK prize (€1.1M).

See nobelprize.org.
Also New York Times.