In the early 1990s, while companies such as IBM and Seagate were in the initial stages of developing hard drives based on the phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), researchers in the U.S. and Canada used neutron beams to generate a seminal understanding of GMR principles. Informed by this scientific knowledge, the technology advanced significantly, dramatically reducing the cost of computer memory. In 2024, the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) calculated the benefit to U.S. consumers from lower computer memory costs from 1998 through 2005 at a present value of $114 billion, excluding other benefits from the widespread use of these computers in the economy.
Canada’s contributions included neutron beam measurements at the NRU reactor at Chalk River Laboratories to characterize the GMR effect in candidate materials for hard drives. At least one student who earned his PhD conducting such measurements went to work for Seagate upon graduation, bringing his expertise while the company was still developing its first commercial GMR hard drive.
Without the experiments using neutron beams at U.S. and Canadian neutron sources, the road to commercial GMR hard drives would have been much longer. RTI calculated the economic impact of neutron-based research, assuming it accelerated hard drive commercialization by only two years ($10B). Scaling the impact to the Canadian economy places the value to Canada at about $800 million—as much as all of Canada’s investments in neutron beam laboratories over 70 years (estimated at $750 million).
