PRL 50th Anniversary Timeline

Physical Review commences publication and is located at Cornell University's Franklin Hall in Ithaca, New York, where its founders Edward Nichols and Ernest Merritt are professors in the Physics Department. They are joined soon afterwards by the recent graduate, Frederick Bedell, who obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1892 from the same department.

The first volume of Physical Review has 6 issues and 24 articles, totaling 480 pages. The first issue in July-August, 1893, is only 80 pages long.

Edward L. Nichols of Cornell University is the founder and first Editor of Physical Review.

An Editorial Note explaining the purpose of Minor Contributions appears in Phys. Rev. 1(2), 139 (1893). The first Minor Contribution is entitled "An Acoustic Pyrometer" (submitted March 1893, published September 1893) and is the antecedent of all short papers in the Physical Review.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen at the University of Würzburg discovers x rays, for which he receives the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Only one year after the discovery, x-ray imaging is used for medical purposes.

J. J. Thomson performs three experiments using the cathode-ray tube and discovers the electron.

In attempting to solve the problem of the spectrum of blackbody radiation, Max Planck introduces the idea that electromagnetic energy can only be emitted in discrete units.

APS membership surpasses 100 in 1901.

Albert Einstein produces five seminal papers on the determination of molecular dimensions, Brownian motion, the theory of relativity, the mass-energy relation (m = E/c²), and the photoelectric effect.

At Ernest Rutherford's suggestion, research assistant Hans Geiger and student Ernest Marsden perform an experiment at the University of Manchester to test the "plum pudding" model of the atom. The interpretation of the unexpected data and subsequent careful measurements lead to the discovery of the atomic nucleus.

Two Errata are published in 1911, but one is merely for omission of labeling in a figure, and is thus the first Publisher's Note.

The American Physical Society takes over the publication of the Physical Review on January 1, 1913.

Arthur Eddington observes the bending of starlight passing near the Sun during a solar eclipse, confirming a key prediction of Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity.

APS membership surpasses 1000 in 1919.

Physical Review moves to the University of Minnesota in 1926, where Editor John Torrence Tate is located. It remains there until 1951.

In 1928, at the APS Meeting in New York, a resolution passes, authorizing the publication of a supplement to the Physical Review. Thus, Reviews of Modern Physics begins publication in 1929 under Tate's editorship.

1929 ushers in a new form of Physical Review publication. Six Letters to the Editor appear in the first issue of volume 34. The idea for PRL as the first letter-format journal will come to pass 29 years later.

The Manhattan Project is created for the development of the atomic bomb. It culminates, four years later, in the detonation of three nuclear weapons: a plutonium implosion bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, a uranium bomb over Hiroshima, and a second plutonium bomb over Nagasaki.

The first Shelter Island Conference, entitled "Conference on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics," is held on Shelter Island, New York in June 1947; the 24 invited attendees include J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Julian Schwinger. The papers that emerge from the informal discussions held at this conference make major contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.

The American Institute of Physics, an umbrella organization of physics-related societies including the American Physical Society, begins publication of the magazine Physics Today.

Physical Review moves to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Sam Goudsmit becomes Editor of Physical Review and is responsible for launching Physical Review Letters seven years later. In 1967 he is named Editor-in-Chief.

APS membership surpasses 10,000 in 1951.

Francis Crick and James D. Watson present their proposal for the double-helical structure of DNA and its replication scheme. The critical experimental evidence for their proposal comes from Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, who performed x-ray diffraction studies of DNA crystals..

Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, is launched by the USSR on October 4, 1957.

Volume 1, Issue 1 contains 25 Letters, including "Rest Mass of the Neutrino" by J. J. Sakurai, "Element No. 102" by A. Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J. R. Walton, and G. T. Seaborg, and "Instability, Turbulence, and Conductivity in Current-Carrying Plasma" by O. Buneman.

Sam Goudsmit begins using typewriters for composition on July 1, 1958 and soon the office is overrun with typewriters. PRL continues to use typewriter composition until it adopts photocomposition.

George Trigg is one of the first editors of Physical Review Letters. He remains an editor for 30 years.

PRL changes from a biweekly publication to a weekly enterprise in January 1964.

Using a horn antenna intended to detect radio waves bounced off of echo balloon satellites, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs discover a uniform cosmic radiation (a remnant of the Big Bang) that was predicted in 1948 by George Gamow and Ralph Alpher.

As an experiment, Letters are allowed to have abstracts, beginning May 1966. Abstracts become a requirement by April 1968 because the experiment turned out to be very successful.

As a result of the large number of excessively long manuscripts being submitted to PRL, a length restriction is imposed effective September 15, 1967; manuscripts are restricted to 10 double-spaced typed pages, with no more than three figures, tables, or similar material.

In 1967 PRL publishes more than 1000 manuscripts.

The standard model of particle physics is developed over three years. Advances include theoretical underpinnings, such as the proof that gauge theories are renormalizable (the infinities are under control), to building a model for the observed phenomenology, such as the explanation of CP (charge-parity) violation from a phase in the quark mixing matrix.

The first stand-alone microprocessor is developed nearly one decade after fabrication of the first integrated circuit. It has a processing speed of 740 kHz, contains 2300 transistors, and marks the beginning of commercial computing chips.

During its first 15 years of operation, the Editors of Physical Review Letters sought counsel from only one referee for each new manuscript. Following the recommendation of the ad hoc advising committee on the journal, a new editorial practice of sending each new paper to two referees is adopted at the end of 1972. See Editorial Notice, Phys. Rev. Lett. 29, 1717 (1972).

In 1974 Benjamin Chalmers Frazer is appointed Managing Editor of Physical Review, a position he holds through 1981.

Beginning with the issue of September 2, 1974, PRL inaugurates a Comments section [see Phys. Rev. Lett. 33, 183 (1974)]. Comments are intended to be short notes that present small additions to Letters previously published in this journal.

The Editorial Board of the journal is formally established in 1974. Its members are established scientists at various institutions who advise the editors. This practice was informally in place already prior to 1974. The formation of the Editorial Board is announced in Sam Goudsmit's "Swan Song" editorial.

From 1976 to 1999, the Physics Auxiliary Publication Service (PAPS) of the American Institute of Physics provides authors publishing in APS journals with a depository for supplementary printed materials such as data tables. All printed materials in the PAPS archive are available to the community via direct order to the AIP. (See also EPAPS in 1996.)

Robert K. Adair is the Editor of Physical Review Letters from September 1978 to September 1983.

David Lazarus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is appointed Editor-in-Chief and serves until 1991.

With the growth of the journals, Physical Review builds a new office in Ridge, New York (close to Brookhaven National Laboratory). The operation moves there in 1980. Currently, the office accommodates about 150 employees.

Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invent the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981. The first electron microscope was built in 1931 by Ernst Ruska. All three share the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics. [Shown here is the image of surface reconstruction on a clean Au(100) surface, as seen using scanning tunneling microscopy.]

As Physical Review Letters grows and evolves to respond to the changes in the vast scientific landscape to be covered, the acceptance criteria of the journal necessarily change. As of January 1, 1982, a modification in the acceptance criteria, approved by the APS at the recommendation of the Publication Oversight Committee, is put in place. The modified acceptance criteria emphasize the requirements for accessibility and interest to the general readership of the journal. This formulation of priorities further evolves to what is known today as "the importance and broad interest criteria."
See Minor Contributions in Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 1605 (1980) (pictured) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 47, 1421 (1981).

George Vineyard is the Editor of Physical Review Letters from September 1983 until February 1987.

Computer-controlled photocomposition begins on March 5, 1984 with Phys. Rev. Lett. Volume 52, Issue 10.

The first record of outgoing email from the editorial office is on December 31, 1986.

Jack Sandweiss of Yale University becomes the Editor of Physical Review Letters in November 1987 and currently holds this position.

Physical Review Letters, always an international journal, becomes even more so in 1990 as submissions from outside the United States outnumber those from within.

The number of APS members surpasses 40,000 in 1990.

The electronic-preprint service, now known as the "arXiv" (the X stands in for the Greek letter "chi"), is created in 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg. In 2001, arXiv operations are transferred to Cornell University. The arXiv and the Physical Review are linked: e-prints that are published in a journal can have a journal reference in the arXiv entry, and the APS supports citations to the arXiv and has a mirror site http://aps.arXiv.org/.

The first incoming email correspondence stored in the editorial database is a message from an author received on 2 December 1991.

In 1991 PRL publishes more than 2000 manuscripts.

Ben Bederson arrives from New York University, and from Physical Review A, in January 1992 to take over from David Lazarus as Editor-in-Chief.

A referee report for Physical Review Letters received on 30 March 1992 is the first emailed report recorded in the database.

The first online version of Physical Review Letters appears on July 1, 1995.

Bose-Einstein condensation is observed experimentally, 70 years after its theoretical prediction, by cooling rubidium-87 atoms. Later, in 2001, Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle win the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

The first electronic request asking a referee to review a paper is sent in 1995.

Since 1996, authors of APS journals, including Physical Review Letters, can add supplementary material online via AIP's Electronic Physics Auxiliary Publication Service (EPAPS). This replaces the hard-copy service called PAPS (see PAPS in 1976). EPAPS files are open access, and include, for instance, data tables, text, images, and multimedia files. Example

Martin Blume arrives from Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1996 and remains as Editor-in-Chief until 2007.

In 1997 the editors of the journals of APS consult, for the first time, more referees from outside the United States than from within.

Physical Review Focus is a free service of the American Physical Society. Focus stories explain selected physics research published in the Society's journals. The Focus home page also provides links to Physics News Update stories from the American Institute of Physics when they cover papers from APS journals.

In 1998 PRL publishes more than 3000 manuscripts.

Starting with volume 87, PRL begins printing an image from each issue on the journal cover. The images are chosen primarily for aesthetic merit and also for variety. See PRL Editorial: Electronic-First Publication and New Cover Design.

By 2002, 69% of all requests for review are made electronically. This number will increase to 99% by the year 2007.

Within a year of its launch in October 2004, all journals of the American Physical Society have switched from a paper-based to a fully electronic editorial workflow management system.

Partly in response to a recommendation by the PRL Evaluation Committee, the Editors significantly increase the number of papers sent back upon submission without external review. Roughly a quarter of incoming manuscripts now are accorded this early decision, compared to single-digit percentages a decade earlier. See the editorials Higher Standards: The Role of Authors and Early Decisions by Editors.

Free to Read, an open access initiative of the American Physical Society, is launched in September 2006. Through the Free to Read program, anyone can pay a one-time fee to make articles published in Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics freely available to all readers.

In 2006 PRL publishes just over 4000 manuscripts.

Editors' Suggestions, an initiative to mark a small subset of well-written, interesting PRL papers for the purpose of encouraging reading across fields, begins on January 1, 2007.

Gene Sprouse is the current Editor-in-Chief. He joins APS from Stony Brook University.

Physical Review Letters celebrates its 50th birthday in 2008.