Achievements in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, among other fields, will be honored by the Wolf Foundation, which has awarded a half-dozen prizes in the sciences annually since 1978. Six of this year's award recipients do physics-related work.
Two of those recipients have also been recognized by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, which administers the Japan Prize.
The Wolf physics prize will be shared by Albert Fert, professor of physics at Université de Paris–Sud and scientific director at the CNRS/Thales Joint Physics Unit in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, a research scientist at the Institute for Solid State Research in the Jülich Research Center in Germany. They will receive the award, according to the citation, “for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and...
