Physical Review Letters

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.

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

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

Nominations for three Chemical Physics prizes are due June 1st.

“Microscopy of Cavity-Induced Density-Wave Ordering in Ultracold Gases.” Tabea Bühler (Institute of Physics and Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland).
Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 143401

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.

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.

”Strict Universality of the Square-Root Law in Price Impact across Stocks: A Complete Survey of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”
Yuki Sato and Kiyoshi Kanazawa (Kyoto University).
Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 257401

Kushal Lodha is recognized for his leading contribution to one of the DESI Data Release 2 papers: Extended dark energy analysis using DESI DR2 BAO measurements, K. Lodha et al., Physical Review D 112, 083511 (2025), published 6 October 2025. This marks the inaugural presentation of the prize, which is awarded by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Topical Group of the Physical Review journals. The award will be formally presented at the APS Global Physics Summit in Denver, Colorado.

Each year, Physical Review Letters (PRL) publishes approximately 2,500 Letters across 52 issues. From this vast output, the editors curate a selection of the most outstanding papers from the wide range of topics PRL covers in fundamental and applied physical science.

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.

We seek a dynamic and personable individual with postdoctoral experience in soft matter and statistical physics, to join our close-knit team of editors running the world’s leading physics journal.

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

We seek a dynamic and personable individual with postdoctoral experience in gravitation, astrophysics, or cosmology, to join our close-knit team of editors running the world’s leading physics journal.

Apply Now: APS - Associate Editor, Physical Review Letters

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.

“New Plasma Regime in Jupiter’s Auroral Zones.”
Presenter: R. L. Lysak (University of Minnesota) Moderator: Ellen Zweibel, (University of Wisconsin-Madison).
Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 035201

The merged black hole rang out in spacetime as it settled post-collision, offering clues about the remnant’s structure and properties.

APS is delighted to announce that Dr. Rafael Fernandes has been appointed to the role of Lead Editor of Physical Review Letters, the flagship publication of the American Physical Society.

“Establishing a New Benchmark in Quantum Computational Advantage with 105-qubit Zuchongzhi 3.0 Processor.”
Presenter: Xiaobo Zhu (University of Science and Technology of China)
Moderator: To be announced
Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 090601

High rankings demonstrate the impact, reach, and influence of the American Physical Society’s journals.

The ‘About’ pages for each APS journal have recently been updated with new data from the 2024 Journal Citation Reports (2025, Clarivate), CiteScore (Scopus Elsevier) and SCImago Journal Rank (SCImago). View the metrics of the entire library on the Journal Metrics page.

The American Physical Society proudly announces the launch of The Physics Archive, a comprehensive digital library that covers 120 years of groundbreaking research from the world-renowned Physical Review journals.

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.

APS is proud to announce a new open access initiative designed to further extend the benefits of open access to a broader set of authors. The new policy, effective today, makes all papers authored by cats freely available.

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

The renewal agreement with CERN enables authors to publish high-energy physics articles open access in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C and Physical Review D with no article publication charges. APS’ continued participation in SCOAP³ exemplifies its commitment to advancing open access in scholarly research.

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

Today we announce a new initiative, called End Matter, to allow up to about two pages at the end of a Letter of appendixes or other content that specialists will want or need to read.

The American Physical Society (APS) is pleased to announce that it will begin sponsoring Astrobites, a daily astrophysical literature journal written by graduate students in astronomy. This mutually beneficial collaboration aims to enhance the dissemination of research, educational resources, and career insights in the field of astronomy and astrophysics.

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.

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.

PRL is launching a new series of concise Essays that envision the future in areas of interest to our broad readership.

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.

Mark your calendars: PRX Life, the first interdisciplinary journal focused exclusively on biological physics and quantitative life science research, will officially begin accepting submissions March 20, 2023.

APS is pleased to announce that Dr. Stephen Nagler of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been selected to succeed Dr. Laurens Molenkamp as Lead Editor of Physical Review B. The transition to Dr. Nagler will be effective as of February 1st, 2023.

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 new journals, special content, and a broad outreach effort, the Physical Review journals aim to be a leader in publishing applied research.

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.

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).

Dark matter accounts for roughly 85% of the matter in the Universe, yet its constituents remain unknown. Solving this mystery calls for a wide range of experiments that can detect dark matter constituents with different masses and interactions. Now, Gadi Afek at Yale University and colleagues have proposed a laboratory-based detector that is drastically different from existing experiments.

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.

On March 24, join the Physical Review Journal Club for an exclusive panel discussion with Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi, Sapienza Università di Roma, along with co-authors Paolo Rissone, Universitat de Barcelona, and Eric I. Corwin, University of Oregon on their PRL paper, Long-Range Anomalous Decay of the Correlation in Jammed Packings, a work cited by the Nobel committee in their prize announcement.

APS has appointed Professor Joseph Kapusta, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota as the Lead Editor of Physical Review C. Professor Kapusta takes the helm following the journal’s previous Lead Editor Benjamin F. Gibson.

Robert Garisto (right) has been named the Managing Editor of Physical Review Letters, the world’s premier physics journal. As Managing Editor, Garisto will lead PRL’s editorial team and provide scientific direction for the journal in partnership with PRL’s Lead Editor, Hugues Chaté.

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.

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.

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.

It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing in November 2020 of our former colleague, Jack Sandweiss, who was Editor of PRL for a quarter of a century (1987-2013).

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 American Physical Society is conducting an international search for a new Lead Editor of Physical Review Fluids. The Lead Editor will provide intellectual leadership and vision for editorial standards and policies, direct the journal, and lead its editorial board and staff of editors. Physical Review Fluids (PRFluids) is dedicated to publishing innovative research that will significantly advance the fundamental understanding of fluid dynamics. PRFluids is strongly supported by APS’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), and closely interacts with the DFD Executive Committee to expand its scope into emerging research areas of fluid dynamics.

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).

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 celebrate the life of Kelvin Lynn (1948–2020). He was an Associate Editor for PRL and PRB from 1984 until 2012, while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Washington State University. He was part of the “gang of four” editors who helped run PRL for a year while Gene Wells was on sabbatical, during the rush of papers on high-temperature superconductivity. He was a dedicated and spirited editor, who handled countless papers over the years. Our condolences go to his family.

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.

PRL welcomes two editors for the physics of life.

PRL aims to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

Reinhardt B. Schuhmann
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 230001 (2019)

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.

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.

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.

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.”

To mark the passing of Stephen Hawking, we gathered together and made free to read 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.” APS News Article

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.

Physical Review Letters’ Lead Editor, Hugues Chaté, and Managing Editor, Reinhardt Schuhmann, look back at how PRL has evolved and share their vision for the future.

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.

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

Together with the conference organizers, the editors of Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Physical Review B, Physical Review Applied, and Physical Review Materials are pleased to announce a special symposium on August 28, dedicated to a few select works published recently in the Physical Review journals, within and beyond the traditional domain of metamaterials research.

The symposium will be followed by a meet-and-greet event with the Physical Review editors.

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.

A reminder from the Editor in Chief about simultaneous submission of a Letter and an article.

LIGO has published their third gravitational wave detection from an observation in early January 2017. This new detection, published in Physical Review Letters, may help vet previously established theories of how these massive mergers behave, and has already provided a new round of observational data to push forward this new kind of astronomy.

APS and CERN, the host organization of SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), have signed an agreement to make the high-energy physics (HEP) articles published in three leading APS journals open access beginning January 1, 2018. This agreement acts to support the publishing of open access content for wider benefit of the HEP community. Read More

APS is now accepting submissions for Physical Review Materials, the newest member of the Physical Review family of journals. PRMaterials expands the scope of the existing APS journals beyond their current emphasis on the physics of materials and will begin publishing mid-2017.

PRL Lead Editor Hugues Chaté looks ahead to the initiatives he has in mind for the journal in the coming months.

Editor-in-Chief Pierre Meystre welcomes Hugues Chaté as the new Lead Editor of PRL.

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 is excited to announce the launch of Physical Review Materials, the latest addition to the Physical Review family of journals. Targeted to start publishing in mid 2017, PRMaterials will provide a common publication and reference source to the expanding community of physicists, materials scientists, chemists, engineers, and researchers in related disciplines that carry out high-quality original research in materials.

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.

Lead Editor Hugues Chaté discusses why PRL highlights papers as Editors’ Suggestions and how Suggestions are picked.

To mark this anniversary, past Editors’ Suggestions will feature on our homepage throughout 2017, starting with the first one. Suggestions began as an experiment, and now provide a good representation of the quality work that we aim to publish. We hope you enjoy this look back.

The Breakthrough Prize organization announced its 2017 winners and celebrated its 5th anniversary.

APS has selected Dr. Hugues Chaté, a senior scientist at the CEA-Saclay, France, to serve as interim Editor of Physical Review Letters. Hugues will take over this role from Pierre Meystre, who is now the Editor in Chief for the Physical Review family of journals.

Monika Schleier-Smith discusses the importance of hybrid quantum systems for realizing new quantum technologies and probing the frontiers of fundamental physics.

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

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced the winners of its 2016 Kavli prizes in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.

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.

John Wettlaufer discusses the opportunities open to physicists in climate science research.

We are publishing a small representative sample of the many theory papers that attempt to explain recent intriguing LHC data, which might be due to new elementary particles.

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.

Lead Editor Pierre Meystre presents a PRL refresher: Length, Joint Submissions, Highlights and more.