Physical Review Materials

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

APS is delighted to announce the appointment of Ram Seshadri as the newest Lead Editor of Physical Review Materials.

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 pleased to announce that Dr. Lijun Zhang of Jilin University (China) has been selected as an Associate Editor of Physical Review Material. Dr. Zhang’s transition to this role was effective as of January 1, 2025.

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

Physical Review Materials is delighted to highlight that journal editorial board members Jiaqing He of Southern University of Science and Technology, China and Lei Zhou of Fudan University, China have recently been elected fellows of the American Physical Society.

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.

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

We are delighted to highlight that Steven May, Physical Review Materials Associate Editor and Professor and Department Head of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, USA, has recently been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Steve has been a vital contributor to the development of the journal over the past year. He was cited for “significant contributions to the understanding of structural, electronic, and magnetic properties in complex oxide heterostructures.”

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 Materials is delighted to highlight that journal editorial board members Frank Koppens of the Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain and Eva Zurek of the University at Buffalo, USA have recently been elected fellows of the American Physical Society.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Guest Editor David Tománek reflects on the joint Collection at its closing.

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.

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).

Physical Review Materials is delighted to highlight that journal editorial board member Giulia Galli of the University of Chicago has become a newly elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more

Guest Editor David Tománek introduces a collection of papers in Physical Review Applied and Physical Review Materials on two-dimensional materials and devices, in a snapshot of the leading edge of this hot field.

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.

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.

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.

Much is being currently written about machine learning applied to materials science, but, what is machine learning?

Physical Review Materials is delighted to highlight that journal editorial board member Giulia Galli of the University of Chicago has been awarded the 2019 David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics for the invention of methods, especially for the enhancement of ab initio molecular dynamics, to understand, predict, and engineer the electronic and structural properties of materials. Read more

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.

Physical Review Materials is now publishing Research Updates. Research Updates are relatively brief reviews of the current research status in an important and topical area of materials research. These updates need not be as comprehensive as reviews, instead offering concise updates of the progress, challenges, and potential in a specific field of interest to readers of Physical Review Materials. Typical research updates will be up to approximately 10,000 words in length.

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.

Physical Review Materials is delighted to highlight that journal editorial board member Sam Bader of the Argonne National Laboratory has been awarded the 2018 UPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to fundamental and applied magnetism. It is presented every three years at the International Conference on Magnetism (ICM). The Néel Medal is awarded together with the Magnetism Award, since 2003, sponsored by CNRS and Institut Néel. Read more

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.

Physical Review Materials is delighted that journal editorial board member Bradley Olsen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been awarded the 2018 Dillon Medal by APS. Read More

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

A discussion of the focus on materials related research in the Physical Review journals.

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.

The first articles from Physical Review Materials (PRMaterials) are now available online and showcase the high-quality, broad-scope research in APS’s newest journal. All articles appearing in the first issue are free to read through 2017. PRMaterials provides 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 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.

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.

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.