These experiments were performed at low temperatures and in the presence of very high magnetic fields and used laboriously grown materials that cannot be mass-produced, but the magnitude of this discovery sent scientists around the world on a mission to see how they might be able to harness the power of the Giant Magnetoresistive effect. IBM Research Arrives on the Scene Stuart Parkin and two groups of colleagues at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif, quickly recognized its potential, both as an important new scientific discovery in magnetic materials and one that might be used in sensors even more sensitive than MR heads. Parkin first wanted to reproduce the Europeans' results. Parkin s team saw GMR in the first multilayers they made. The key structure in GMR materials is a spacer layer of a non-magnetic metal between two magnetic metals.
Magnetic materials tend to align themselves in the same direction.
So if the spacer layer is thin enough, changing the orientation of one of the magnetic layers can cause the next one to align itself in the same direction. But as Parkin's team made and tested some 30,000 different multilayer combinations of different elements and layer dimensions, they demonstrated the generality of GMR for all transition metal elements and invented the structures that still hold the world records for GMR at low temperature, room temperature and useful fields. The overall resistance is relatively low when the layers were in parallel alignment and relatively high when in anti-parallel alignment. For his pioneering work in GMR, Parkin won the European Physical Society's prestigious 1997 Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize along with Gruenberg and Fert. When a weak magnetic field, such as that from a bit on a hard disk, passes beneath such a structure, the magnetic orientation of the unpinned magnetic layer rotates relative to that of the pinned layer, generating a significant change in electrical resistance due to the GMR effect.