The selection committee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation    decided at its last meeting on October 24, 2014 to give a Humboldt Research Award    to Professor Albert Fert    (France).

Albert Fert, who together with Peter Grünberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect in 2007, will use the prize money for research stays in Germany, among others in Halle. In Halle Albert Fert will also work with Stuart Parkin   , whose merit is the technological development for the utilization of the GMR effect in state-of-the-art storage media.

• Press Release of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (German only, 11/12/2014)

For his doctoral thesis at the University Halle Dr. Stefan Förster has received the 10,000 Euro Max Auwärter Award of the Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG). His work had laid important foundations for the discovery of quasi-crystalline oxide layers and the consequential "Nature" publication.

The quasi-crystalline oxide layers were discovered during research under the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 762 "Functionality of Oxide Interfaces".

• Report in the magazine of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (German only)

Our ability to stream music and videos from the Internet today we owe not least the physicist Stuart Parkin. His inventions in the field of spintronics made it possible to increase the data density on hard drives 1000-fold. For these achievements the director at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle and Humboldt Professor at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) is now awarded the Millennium Technology Prize of the Finnish Academy of Technology. The prize of one million euro is considered the Nobel Prize in the field of technical and medical innovations.

• Press release of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (German only)
• Information by the Technology Academy Finland on the laureate (English)    

Professor Stuart Parkin, awardee of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship and top researcher in the field of storage technology, changes to Halle. On 1 April 2014, he signed the relevant contracts with the Max Planck Society and the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Microstructure Physics in Halle and the MLU had nominated him for the professorship and jointly brought the top physicist to Halle.

Since 1 April 2014, Stuart Parkin is director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and professor at the Institute of Physics of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. He will continue to further develop and shape the field of material sciences, especially of applied spintronics, in Halle.

“When I move to Germany and join the Max Planck Society and the Martin Luther University, I envisage a longterm research perspective to develop new logic devices beyond silicon-based technology. We can find inspiration from nature, from the brain: It can carry out computing operations with a million times less energy than present-day computers”, Stuart Parkin said on the occasion of the signing of the contracts.

Stuart Parkin (born 1955) is an internationally excellent and innovative solid-state physicist who is able to translate materials science and basic research into technological applications. Thus, his work has revolutionized the magnetic data storage world-wide by using the so-called GMR effect for read heads in hard disks. Lately, Parkin explored the possibility of an even higher storage density using a three-dimensional storage medium at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San José, USA and as director of the "Spintronic Science and Applications Center" (SpinAps) founded in 2004 in Stanford, USA.

• Press release of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (German only)
• Information by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation on the laureate (German only)    

Subject of the workshop will be the up-to-date progress in the field of functional oxide interfaces and multiferroic materials. Reviews and state-of-the-art results will be presented by international experts and by the principal investigators and co-workers of the SFB 762.

• More information on the workshop homepage