For the second year in a row, our editors have curated a set of some of the best papers from the wide range of topics PRL covers in fundamental and applied physical science. Congratulations to all the authors in this collection!

This Collection offers an early glimpse into how artificial intelligence and machine learning can further unlock the potential of density functional theory, a highly successful computational method with broad applications.

Here is our Collection of the Year 2024. We have gathered about one issue’s worth of Letters, representative of the wide range of interests of the communities advancing fundamental and applied physical science. We plan to have such a collection each year.

To welcome work from areas across the physical sciences and inspire the new generation of physicists, this series of forward-looking Essays is designed to envision future directions for a given topic .

The ability to generate ultrashort laser pulses of some-ten-attosecond duration has given rise to a new research field, attosecond science, to whose development this Collection is dedicated. The potential of attosecond science has recently been recognized by the Wolf Foundation (Wolf Prize 2022) as well as the Nobel Committee (Nobel Prize in Physics 2023), who honored Pierre Agostini, Paul Corkum, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier for their pioneering work shaping the field.

The editors from Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Physical Review A, and Physical Review Applied have curated a short list of notable recent optics papers published in our journals. This compilation not only highlights research in our core publication areas, but also showcases select interdisciplinary and applied studies, illustrating the kind of submissions we encourage beyond the traditional or perceived scope of the Physical Review journals.

The Physical Review Journals want to be a home for chemists. It is our aim to publish work on electrochemistry and energy science (batteries, supercapacitors, and photocatalysis), nanoparticles and nanotechnology, metrology for analytical chemistry, and quantum information science for computational chemistry.

This retrospective Collection brings together influential research previously published across the portfolio. These papers, selected by our editors for their contribution to the field, have all undergone our standard peer-review process.

A new Collection by the Physical Review journals celebrates the 50th anniversary of the discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics (QCD)—the theoretical basis for the strong force of nature that binds quarks and gluons into hadrons.

Editors from Physical Review Letters, Physical Review Applied, and Physical Review Materials have gathered several recently published papers in soft matter and polymer research in an effort to illustrate the kind of papers these journals are looking for in this topic.

This collection marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of high-temperature superconductors. The papers selected highlight some of the advances that have been made to date, both in understanding why these compounds behave in the way they do, and in utilizing them in applications.

This collection marks the 150th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic Table of Elements.

To mark the passing of Stephen Hawking, we gathered together his 55 papers in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters. They probe the edges of space and time, from "Black holes and thermodynamics” to "Wave function of the Universe."

This collection marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of high-temperature superconductors. The papers selected highlight some of the advances that have been made to date, both in understanding why these compounds behave in the way they do, and in utilizing them in applications.

This collection marks the 35th anniversary of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and the 30th anniversary of atomic force microscopy (AFM). These papers, all published in the Physical Review journals, highlight the positive impact that STM and AFM have had, and continue to have, on physical science research. The papers included in the collection have been made free to read.

The editors of the Physical Review journals have curated a collection of landmark papers on General Relativity to celebrate its centennial.

The editors of the Physical Review journals revisit papers that represent important breakthroughs in the field of optics.

2008 marked PRL’s 50th anniversary. As part of the celebrations a collection of milestone Letters was started. The collection contains Letters that have made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research.