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. How can an active researcher stay informed about the most important developments in physics?
Physics highlights a selection of papers from the Physical Review journals. In consultation with expert scientists, the editors choose these papers for their importance and/or intrinsic interest.
To highlight these papers, Physics features three kinds of articles: Viewpoints are commentaries written by active researchers, who are asked to explain the results to physicists in other subfields. Focus stories are written by professional science writers in a journalistic style and are intended to be accessible to students and non-experts. Synopses are brief editor-written summaries.
Physics provides a much-needed guide to the best in physics, and we welcome your comments (physics@aps.org).
- The Editors
Editorial Staff
Jessica Thomas, Editor
Jessica Thomas joined the American Physical Society as an Assistant Editor with Physical Review Letters and to launch Physics. From 2006 to 2008, she worked in London and New York as part of Nature Nanotechnology'sfirst editorial team. She received her Ph.D. in physics at MIT in 2002. She held a post-doc (2003 to 2004) and later a staff position (2005 to 2006) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the x-ray scattering group of the Condensed Matter and Materials Science Department. 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.
David Ehrenstein, Editor of Focus
David Ehrenstein was the founding Editor of Physical Review Focus, an APS web publication that existed for almost 14 years before its content became part of Physics in 2011. He is now the Physics Focus Editor. He received his Ph.D. in biological physics from the University of Illinois in 1994, working under Hans Frauenfelder on the physics of myoglobin and other proteins. He spent the next three years as a postdoctoral fellow studying the biophysics of the inner ear and as a part-time science writer at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to joining the APS staff, he was an intern at Science magazine, where he wrote research news and science policy articles for the magazine and the ScienceNOW web site. His prior experience also includes a summer stint in 1993 as a radio journalist for Science Update, a nationally broadcast radio program produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
David Voss, Contributing Editor
David Voss was the founding Editor of Physics. Prior to joining the American Physical Society, he was 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.
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.
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 where he is a Senior Assistant Editor, and handles submissions in the field of condensed matter.