Two Europeans have won this year’s Nobel physics prize for a nanotechnology discovery that has led to the miniaturisation of hard disks in laptop computers and music players.

Albert Fert of Université Paris-Sud in France and Peter Grünberg of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany share the $1.54m prize for discovering the phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR. It makes it possible to read data that is densely packed on to the surface of a magnetic disk.