Peter Grünberg

Peter Andreas Grünberg (18 May 1939 – 7 April 2018) was a German physicist.
He won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering giant magnetoresistance. This made gigabyte hard disk drives easier to make. Half of the prize was given to Albert Fert. Fert discovered giant magnetoresistance at the same time. But, Fert and Grünberg did not work together.
Early life.
Grünberg was born in Pilsen, Bohemia. When he was born, Pilsen was controlled by Nazi Germany. They called the country the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It is known now as the Czech Republic. Grünberg's father was named Fjodor Grinberg. He changed his name to Fjodor Grünberg in 1941.
The rest of the Grünberg family stayed for some time in the Petermann house in Untersekerschan. After World War II, the Czech government forced all people living in Pilsen that spoke German to leave the country. This was called the Beneš decrees. He moved with his mother (who died in 2002, aged 74) and sister to Lauterbach, Hesse. He studied at a gymnasium (second level school) there.
Grünberg received a diploma in 1962 from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. Then he studied at the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. He got his diploma in physics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1969 there. From 1969-1972, he studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Later, he joined the Institute for Solid State Physics at the Jülich Research Centre. He was a leading researcher of magnetism until he retired in 2004.
Important work.
Grünberg made important discoveries with ferrite (iron) and magnetism, such as the Giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR) in 1988. GMR has been used in many modern hard drives. Another use of the GMR effect is in magnetic random access memory.
Apart from the Nobel Prize, Grünberg has been awarded with shared prizes in the APS International Prize for New Materials, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award, the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize, the Wolf Prize in Physics in and the 2007 Japan Prize. He won the German Future Prize for Technology and Innovation in 1998. He was named the European Inventor of the Year in the category "Universities and research institutions" by the European Patent Office and European Commission in 2006.
Death.
Grünberg died on 7 April 2018 in Jülich, Germany at the age of 78.