Physical Review A

Our reviewers play a pivotal role in ensuring integrity and quality in our publications, and we deeply value the commitments and efforts of every reviewer.

We welcome Aurelien Dantan (Aarhus University), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

We welcome Peng Xue (Southeast University), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

The six new studies present high-quality findings at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and the physical sciences.

We welcome Ángel Rivas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

The policy allows authors and reviewers to use AI tools and establishes boundaries to preserve human oversight and accountability.

For the first time, we’re offering perpetual rights as an optional enhancement to your APS All subscription. Own the most influential physics research for years to come with Frontlist Perpetual Rights.

We welcome Aonan Zhang (University of Oxford), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

Ten high-quality studies by authors from around the world have found a home in the American Physical Society’s new community-driven, open access journal.

After serving more than 10 years as a remote Associate Editor for Physical Review A, Erika Andersson (Heriot-Watt University) has retired from her position.

We welcome Scott Glancy (National Institute of Standards and Technology), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

APS has selected 156 Outstanding Referees for 2026 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

Starting with volume 113 in January 2026, the section “Atomic and molecular structure and dynamics; high-precision experiments” will be renamed to “Atomic and molecular structure and dynamics; high-precision experiments; chemical physics.”

APS Open Science will provide a community-driven platform that broadens recognition for high-quality physics research across all stages of discovery.

PRX Intelligence will publish high-impact research on artificial intelligence and machine learning that advances the physical sciences.

After serving for a year as a part-time Associate Editor for PRA, Armin Tavakoli has shifted his editorial responsibilities from PRA to PRL. We are very grateful for Armin’s contributions as an editor over the past year and greatly appreciate his efforts on behalf of PRA.

We welcome Alejandro Pozas-Kerstjens (University of Geneva), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

We recognize that the ongoing U.S. government shutdown is affecting many in the scientific community, including authors and reviewers of the Physical Review journals, by delaying projects, disrupting funding, and creating uncertainty.

We welcome Bárbara Lopes Amaral (University of São Paulo), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

Three APS members have received the prize for experiments with a handheld system that revealed quantum physics in action.

The journal is  looking for a full-time Associate Editor with expertise in quantum information science to join its editorial team. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of quantum research and working at the forefront of scientific publishing, apply now. This is a shared position with PRX Quantum.

The American Physical Society has received the leading score among publishers participating in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) in the first evaluation of open science practices in scholarly publishing. With high marks in elements like accessibility, data availability, and article metadata, the Society earned a total score of 20.18 out of 25 — almost double that of the next highest scorer.

APS has selected 160 Outstanding Referees for 2025 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

We are excited to announce updates to our journals platform, offering enhanced accessibility features designed to provide a more inclusive experience.

We welcome Armin Tavakoli (Lund University), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a part-time Associate Editor.

The Physical Review journals would like to congratulate John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto for sharing the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize was awarded for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

The policy requires authors to explain where research data can be found starting Sept. 4.

Physical Review A (PRA) is looking for a new part-time Associate Editor with international scientific standing in the area of quantum science to join our editorial team and become part of the stimulating academic endeavor to bring high-quality papers to our readership.

Clarivate Analytics has released the 2023 Journal Citation Reports, which provides journal impact factors and rankings for over 11,000 scholarly journals.

APS has selected 156 Outstanding Referees for 2024 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

Offer includes Journal Access and waived article publication charges to Scientists in 100+ Lower and Middle Income Countries

APS congratulates the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics recipients Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

APS Editor in Chief, Randall D. Kamien, discusses the importance and impact of journal reviewers.

It is our pleasure to introduce the first published articles from PRX Life, the American Physical Society’s new interdisciplinary, open-access journal exclusively for quantitative biological research.

The American Physical Society (APS), publisher of the Physical Review journals, is joining more than 20,000 individuals and organizations across 160 countries in a commitment to improve how researchers and their contributions to the scientific record are evaluated. APS is proud to mark the 10th anniversary of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) by officially signing on to the international initiative.

View an interview with PRX Life Lead Editor Margaret Gardel and Managing Editor Serena Bradde from the 2023 APS March Meeting for more information on the journal.

APS has selected 153 Outstanding Referees for 2023 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

Physical Review A is excited to offer better visibility and a tailored abstract for our popular Letter articles.

APS is pleased to announce the launch of the newest Physical Review title, PRX Life. PRX Life will offer scientists from a broad range of disciplines—including physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, and medicine—a high impact, fully open access journal dedicated to publishing outstanding research at all scales of biological organization.

With the recent availability of multiple platforms for cloud quantum computing, Physical Review A is formalizing some expectations for manuscripts reporting work that makes use of such platforms.

APS congratulates the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics recipients Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when separated. Their results clear the way for new technology based on quantum information.

We welcome Davide Girolami (Politecnico di Torino), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

The American Physical Society (APS), along with AIP Publishing, IOP Publishing (IOPP), and Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA), surveyed over 3,000 physical science researchers between December 2021 and January 2022 in an effort to understand their perspective on Open Access (OA) publishing. Their responses have been compiled into a report, which will help APS and other publishers better meet the publishing needs of the research community.

APS is now accepting nominations of members, including self-nominations, for the newly restructured role of APS Editor in Chief (EIC).

After serving as a remote Associate Editor for Physical Review A for three years, Margaret Reid is retiring from her editorial position. Margaret handled close to 700 papers in the area of quantum foundations, nonlocality, and quantum coherence with great expertise, and we are very grateful for her contribution as an editor and her efforts on behalf of PRA.

Three journals are excited to announce a new article type, “Perspectives,” to provide forward-looking views of cutting-edge science that has recently emerged or is enjoying renewed activity.

APS has selected 146 Outstanding Referees for 2022 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

After serving more than 18 years in total as a remote Associate Editor for Physical Review E, and then Physical Review A, Mark Saffman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has retired from his position.

We welcome Daniel Leykam (National University of Singapore), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

The American Physical Society (APS) is delighted to announce the appointment of David Scanlon, Professor of Computational Materials Design, University College London, United Kingdom, to the role of Lead Editor of PRX Energy, APS’s new, highly selective, open access journal covering energy science and technology. Professor Scanlon will serve as the inaugural Lead Editor of the journal, which will open for submissions December 7, 2021 and offer an introductory promotion in which all article publication charges (APCs) will be paid by APS through the end of 2022.

Physical Review A​ (PRA) is looking for a new part-time (remote) Associate Editor with international scientific standing in the broader area of photonics, optical materials, and nonlinear optics to join our editorial team and become part of the stimulating academic endeavor to bring high-quality papers to our readership.

APS congratulates the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics recipients Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

Professor Parisi has authored several papers with Physical Review journals. A selection of relevant papers from Physical Review Letters and Reviews in Modern Physics have been made free-to-read.

Patrick Charbonneau, Eric I. Corwin, Giorgio Parisi, and Francesco Zamponi, Universal Microstructure and Mechanical Stability of Jammed Packings, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 205501 (2012).

M. Mézard, G. Parisi, N. Sourlas, G. Toulouse, and M. Virasoro, Nature of the Spin-Glass Phase, Phys. Rev. Lett. 52, 1156 (1984).

G. Parisi, Infinite Number of Order Parameters for Spin-Glasses, Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 1754 (1979).

Paolo Rissone, Eric I. Corwin, and Giorgio Parisi, Long-Range Anomalous Decay of the Correlation in Jammed Packings, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 038001 (2021).

Giorgio Parisi and Francesco Zamponi, Mean-field theory of hard sphere glasses and jamming, Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 789 (2010).

Giorgio Parisi, Order Parameter for Spin-Glasses, Phys. Rev. Lett. 50, 1946 (1983).

The American Physical Society (APS) today released the details of its name change policy for the Physical Review journals. The policy is intended to make the world’s leading physics journals more inclusive and ensure authors retain ownership of prior work published under a different name.

At the beginning of 2021, eight Physical Review journals began publishing Letters which are intended for the accelerated publication of important new results targeted to the specific readership of each journal.

APS has selected 151 Outstanding Referees for 2021 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

We are very pleased to offer the readers of Physical Review X a new, carefully curated collection of articles from the vibrant field of laser-plasma particle acceleration. Some of the articles have already been published, and others will be forthcoming. This Collection is the latest in the journal’s series of Special Collections on current or emerging fields and topics.

Starting January 1, 2021, the Rapid Communications article type will be renamed to Letters. With this change, all eight Physical Review journals that had previously classified articles of the type “Rapid Communications” will adopt the practice of Physical Review Applied and now publish such articles as Letters.

APS Editor in Chief, Michael Thoennessen, discusses a new opportunity for communicating authors to include their pronouns together with their contact email in order to promote a more respectful, inclusive, and equitable environment.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, which has been awarded for discoveries about black holes, one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe. This year’s prize is awarded to Roger Penrose (University of Oxford), Reinhard Genzel (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and University of California, Berkeley), and Andrea Ghez (University of California, Los Angeles).

APS and the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG) have finalized the terms of a strategic partnership that allows MPG authors to easily publish open access in all hybrid and gold Physical Review journals at no direct cost to authors. At the center of the collaboration is APS’s first “read and publish” pilot, covering the calendar year 2020, and building upon the long-standing relationship between APS and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL).

We are reorganizing and modernizing the sectioning scheme of Physical Review A (PRA). As of July 1, 2020, the journal will include eight sections instead of the previous seven.

Editor in Chief, Michael Thoennessen, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Physical Review A, B, C, and D.

APS has selected 147 Outstanding Referees for 2020 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts submitted to the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

We welcome Ugo Ancarani (Université de Lorraine) to the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

APS congratulates the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics recipients James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”, and Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.” Read more in this update from APS News.

Over the last months several new editors have been welcomed to our team and had overlap with some of our highly-esteemed editors who depart this month.

We welcome Daniel Felinto (Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

We welcome Gabriele De Chiara (Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, UK), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

After serving for more than three years as a remote Associate Editor for Physical Review A, Marek Zukowski has decided to retire from his position, effective June 30, 2019.

We welcome Professor Margaret D. Reid (Centre for Quantum and Optical Science, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

APS has selected 143 Outstanding Referees for 2019 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts submitted to the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

The first update to REVTeX since 2010 is now available. REVTeX 4.2 includes bug fixes, improved functionality, and support for more societies and journals. For more information, please visit the REVTeX home page.

We welcome Bill Munro (NTT’s Basic Research Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan), who joins the editorial staff of Physical Review A as a remote Associate Editor.

After almost thirteen years at the helm of Physical Review A, Gordon Drake of the University of Windsor is retiring from his position as Lead Editor of PRA.

The American Physical Society (APS) has appointed Dr. Jan Michael Rost, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, as the Lead Editor of Physical Review A (PRA). He takes over this role from Dr. Gordon Drake, who has served as PRA’s Lead Editor since February 2006. Dr. Rost formerly served as an Editorial Board member for PRA from January 2004 to December 2006 and begins his new role January 1, 2019.

We are saddened to report the passing of our dear friend and colleague Bernd Crasemann, former Editor of Physical Review A, on the morning of Sunday, October 28, 2018, at the age of 96.

APS congratulates the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics recipients Arthur Ashkin “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems,” and Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.”

PhySH, APS’s physics classification scheme, is now publicly available under a Creative Commons CC0 license. Created to provide a fully open, high-quality classification scheme for the entire physics community, PhySH groups concepts into a flexible hierarchy that organizes content by topics.

Lead Editor, Gordon Drake, and Managing Editor, Thomas Pattard, discuss the evolution and history of Physical Review A.

In order to recognize the expanding interest in high-precision measurement of atomic and molecular properties as well as fundamental constants, starting July 2018, Physical Review A is explicitly adding high-precision measurement to the heading of its structure and dynamics section. The revised section title now reads Atomic and molecular structure and dynamics; high-precision measurement.

The conference organizers and the editors of Physical Review are pleased to announce the program for the Physical Review Journals Symposium at Metamaterials 2018. This special session will feature four talks based on select works published in the Physical Review journals. In addition to this session, there will be a meet-and-greet event with the Physical Review editors.

The American Physical Society is conducting an international search for a new Lead Editor of Physical Review A.

As a service to the community, APS has made “Physics Physique физика” freely available online. This small journal published fewer than 100 articles between 1964-1968 and includes papers by many notable physicists, including J. S. Bell’s paper “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox.”

APS has selected 147 Outstanding Referees for 2018 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts submitted to the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

The Physical Review journals and Reviews of Modern Physics now make Corrections of minor errors in published papers.

Publisher Matthew Salter and Editor in Chief, Michael Thoennessen, kick off the 125th anniversary of The Physical Review and 25th anniversary of Physical Review E.

Together with the conference organizers, the editors of the Physical Review Journals are pleased to announce a special symposium of invited talks at Metamaterials 2018, highlighting some of the latest works within and beyond the traditional domain of metamaterials research.

APS congratulates Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne for winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”
APS News Article

On July 18, 2017, APS, along with the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP), has taken an important step towards working more closely with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) system of unique identifiers by signing the ORCID open letter requiring the collection of ORCID iDs in their publishing processes.

Starting on July 11, APS will begin participating in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a collaboration among scholarly publishers to make information freely available about what papers are cited by a given journal article. This information had always been available to those subscribing to the Physical Review journals, but now the citation data will be open to all.

Nuclear physicist Michael Thoennessen has been selected to become APS Editor in Chief at the end of August 2017. Currently an Associate Director of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University (MSU) in Lansing, Michigan, and University Distinguished Professor of Physics at MSU, he was appointed following a vote of the APS Board of Directors on June 16.

After a thoughtful, deliberative process involving an examination of the alignment of the values of APS with the goals of the March for Science on April 22 in Washington, D.C., the APS Council Steering Committee, on behalf of the Council of Representatives, unanimously voted to endorse the march.

The journals of the American Physical Society welcome and will continue to welcome manuscripts from all countries, with publication based on scientific merit alone.

APS has selected 150 Outstanding Referees for 2017 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

It is with great sadness that we must report the passing of our dear friend and colleague, and former Associate Editor of Physical Review A, Keith B. MacAdam, on the morning of Sunday, November 6, 2016.

After more than 20 years as an Associate Editor for Physical Review A, Lee Collins has decided to retire from his editorial position.

Pierre Meystre of the University of Arizona has been appointed Editor in Chief of the Physical Review research journals.

We are saddened by the passing on April 16 of our dear colleague Peter Adams, one of the founders of the Physical Review family of journals. We offer our heartfelt condolences to his family.

Physical Review A announces a new Associate Editor.

APS has selected 146 Outstanding Referees for 2016 that have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees for 2016 is available online.