About Physics

Physicists are drowning in a flood of research papers in their own fields and coping with an even larger deluge in other areas of physics. The Physical Review journals alone published over 18,000 papers last year. How can an active researcher stay informed about the most important developments in physics?

Physics highlights exceptional papers from the Physical Review journals. To accomplish this, Physics features expert commentaries written by active researchers who are asked to explain the results to physicists in other subfields. These commissioned articles are edited for clarity and readability across fields and are accompanied by explanatory illustrations.

Each week, editors from each of the Physical Review journals choose papers that merit this treatment, aided by referee comments and internal discussion. We select commentary authors from around the world who are known for their expertise and communication skills and we devote much effort to editing these commentaries for broad accessibility.

Physics features three kinds of articles: Viewpoints are essays of approximately 1000–1500 words that focus on a single Physical Review paper or PRL letter and put this work into broader context. Trends are concise review articles (3000–4000 words in length) that survey a particular area and look for interesting developments in that field. Synopses (200 words) are staff-written distillations of interesting and important papers each week. In addition, we intend to publish selected Letters to the Editor to allow readers a chance to comment on the commentaries and summaries.

Physics provides a much-needed guide to the best in physics, and we welcome your comments (physics@aps.org).

- The Editors

Editorial Staff

David Voss, Editor

David Voss was formerly a senior editor of Science, where he helped develop the Perspectives commentary section in 1992. From 1986 to 1997, he was responsible for soliciting and handling peer-reviewed manuscripts in physics and related fields. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1981 on interactions of infrared lasers with dense laboratory plasmas, followed by postdoctoral research at Princeton University in ultrafast laser spectroscopy of surfaces and biomolecules. From 1983 to 1985 he was an NRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Optical Sciences division of the Naval Research Laboratory, after which he joined the lab as a staff physicist. As a freelance science writer, his work has appeared in Science, Nature, Wired, Technology Review, Physics World, and New Scientist.

Jessica Thomas, Assistant Editor

Jessica received her B.Sc. in Physics from Yale University in 1997 (her undergraduate thesis advisor was Victor Henrich). She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at MIT in the group of Marc Kastner. She held a post-doc (2003–2004) and later a staff position (2005–2006) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the x-ray scattering group of the Condensed Matter and Materials Science Department. Jessica took a detour from research in 2006 to move to London and work with the launch of a new journal, Nature Nanotechnology. In 2008, she joined the American Physical Society as an Assistant Editor of Physical Review Letters. Her research background is in experimental condensed matter physics, specifically x-ray and neutron scattering studies of magnetic and structural order in oxides. She is also a freelance science writer.

Sarma Kancharla, Contributing Editor

Sarma Kancharla obtained his Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 2002 in theoretical condensed matter physics specializing in strongly correlated systems with Gabriel Kotliar. He undertook postdoctoral research at Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada (2002–2005) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (2005–2007) on topics such as high-temperature superconductivity, doped Mott insulators, and metal-insulator transitions. He joined the American Physical Society to work as an Assistant Editor for Physical Review B in 2007.

Alex Klironomos, Contributing Editor

Alex Klironomos received a Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Florida in 2002 under the supervision of Alan Dorsey. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory and at the Physics Department of the Ohio State University. His research involved a variety of topics in superconductivity, quantum Hall effect, and mesoscopic physics. He joined the American Physical Society as an Assistant Editor of Physical Review B in 2007.

Samindranath Mitra, Contributing Editor

Samindranath (Sami) Mitra received a Ph.D. from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1994, where he worked with Allan MacDonald on certain theoretical aspects of the quantum Hall effect. Following a stint at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Sami has been with Physical Review Letters since 1996. He is currently an Associate Editor and handles papers on mainly transport properties in semiconductors and mesoscopic systems. He also works on innovations related to the journals of the American Physical Society.

Daniel Ucko, Contributing Editor

Daniel Ucko was born in Sweden, and educated in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. He received his M.Sci. in physics from University College London in 1997, and completed his Ph.D. on the magnetism of nanoscale granular materials at the same institution in 2001. Following his Ph.D. work, he went on to a research fellowship based at the University of Birmingham and the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Switzerland, concentrating on work on low-energy muon spin relaxation and rotation. In 2004 he joined Physical Review Letters as an Assistant Editor, where he handles submissions in the field of condensed matter.