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Science 16 August 1996:
Vol. 273. no. 5277, pp. 880 - 881
DOI:

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Alexander Hellemans

10 years ago, Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Center in Germany discovered a metallic structure that did not seem to obey the ubiquitous Ohm's law. He constructed a sandwich of two iron layers separated by a thin film of chromium and found that at constant voltage he could vary the current through it simply by applying a magnetic field. The resistance of the structure was no longer a constant. Even greater changes of resistance in magnetic fields were soon found in complex oxides called manganese perovskites, closely related to high-temperature superconductors. These phenomena offer tantalizing prospects for applications such as reading heads in hard disk drives and digital videotape recorders and commercial devices are coming soon.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)