Physical Review Letters Celebrates 50 Years

Physical Review Letters, started by Editor Sam Goudsmit as an experiment, reaches its 50th anniversary in July 2008. We are marking this occasion in several ways (see the editorial). This page will be updated frequently with historical highlights and personal reminiscences as well as information on celebratory events taking place throughout the year. Feedback to feedback@ridge.aps.org is welcome.

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Essay: The Future of Scientific Publishing

May 11, 2009

How can the scientific publishing enterprise deal with the increasing specialization of individual physicists? The possible aids include virtual journals, the new APS journal Physics, and the possibility of artificial intelligence programs.

Milestone Letters

January 12, 2009

Edited by Martin Blume

Letters from the Past — A PRL Retrospective: This week's Milestone Letters were originally published in 2000.

Milestone Letters: Optical frequency combs

Milestone Letters: Left-handed materials and perfect lenses

Milestone Letters >

Timeline

Edited by Sonja Grondalski

The timeline features events related to the Physical Review and PRL, as well as seminal developments in physics after 1893. We also list a few important papers published by the journals. Papers published in PRL will be added to the timeline periodically.

PRL Celebrates 50 Years
Join us as we commemorate 50 years of moving physics forward.
Editorials and Essays Milestone Letters	PRL Timeline Special Events

Event Calendar

Complete Calendar >

Most cited Letters from 1959

1	Calculation of Partition Functions
2	Spontaneously Growing Transverse Waves in a Plasma Due to an Anisotropic Velocity Distribution
3	Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Theory of Superconductivity in the Case of Overlapping Bands
4	Precession of the Polarization of Particles Moving in a Homogeneous Electromagnetic Field
5	Field Theory Commutators
6	Image of the Fermi Surface in the Vibration Spectrum of a Metal
7	Oxides Which Show a Metal-to-Insulator Transition at the Neel Temperature
8	Effect of a Pion-Pion Scattering Resonance on Nucleon Structure
9	Free Induction Decays of Rotating Solids
10	Dipole State in Nuclei

Did you know?

In 2003, Physical Review Letters received a total of 9,367 new submissions; in 2008 that number was 11,653.