Up for auction the "Nobel Prize in Physics" Albert Fert Hand Signed 4X6 Color Photo. 

ES-7990E

Albert

Fert (French: [albɛʁ fɛʁ]; born 7 March 1938, Carcassonne, France) is a French physicist and one of the discoverers

of giant magnetoresistance which

brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks.

Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay,

scientific director of a joint laboratory (Unité mixte de recherche)

between the Centre

national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific

Research Centre) and Thales Group, and adjunct

professor at Michigan State University.

He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together

with Peter Grünberg. Fert

graduated in 1962 from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There

he followed the courses of great physicists like Alfred Kastler or Jacques Friedel, and was passionate about photography and

cinema (he was a big admirer of the work of Ingmar Bergman). After

graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, he attended the University of Grenoble and in 1963 received his Ph.D. (doctorat

de troisième cycle) from the University of Paris with

a thesis prepared in the fundamental electronic Orsay Faculty of Sciences and in the physical

spectrometry laboratory of the University of Grenoble Faculty of Sciences. After

his return from military service in 1965, he was assistant professor at the

Orsay Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris XI (Université Paris-Sud), and

prepared under the direction of Ian Campbell within the Laboratory

of Solid Physics of the faculty for a doctorate Sc.D. (doctorat

des sciences) in Physical Sciences devoted to the properties of electrical

transport in nickel and iron,

which he completed in 1970, and was made a professor there in 1976. He

worked as research director for the university's condensed-matter physics laboratory

(1970–1995) prior to heading to Unité Mixte de Physique, a laboratory jointly

run by the Université Paris-Sud and the technology company Thales. In 1988, Albert Fert at Orsay in France and Peter

Gruenberg in Jülich in Germany, simultaneously and independently, discovered

the giant magnetoresistance (GMR)

of the magnetic multilayers. This discovery is recognized as the birth of

spintronics, a research field which is often described as a new type of

electronics exploiting not only the electric charge of the electrons but also their

magnetism (their spin). Spintronics has already important applications. One

knows that the introduction of GMR read heads in hard disks has led to a

considerable increase of their capacity of information storage.[9] Other spintronic properties are exploited in

the M-RAM that are expected to impact soon the technology of the computers

and phones. In 2007, together with Prof. Grünberg, the received the

renown Japan Award (300.000

Euro) for their discovery of GMR. The same year, they received the Nobel prize

in Physics. In October 2006, Professor Fert received the honorary doctorate

from the Department of Physics of the University

of Kaiserslautern. Albert

Fert had many contributions to the development of spintronics and, after his

2007 Nobel Prize, he is exploring the emerging direction of the exploitation of

topological properties in spintronics.[11] His most recent works are on the topologically

protected magnetic solitons called skyrmions and on the conversion between

charge and spin current by topological insulators