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IMAGE: His inventions in the field of spintronics have revolutionised computer technology. For this, Stuart Parkin will be honoured with the King Faisal Prize for Science 2021. view more
Credit: Marco Warmuth, TGZ Halle GmbH
Parkin s inventions in the field of spintronics have revolutionised computer technology, making it possible to increase the data density on hard disks by a factor of 1000. With his research on thin magnetic layers, he created the basis at IBM on which the company developed a new read head for hard disks. This reads data reliably even from very densely packed magnetic storage materials. This laid the foundation for Big Data, i.e. the handling of large amounts of data. Not least because of this, films and pictures can now be easily exchanged via social networks or computer clouds, making them available to groups of networked computers. These spin-valve recording read heads were only the tip of the spintronics iceberg. As a second major invent