Physical Review Letters (PRL) is the world’s premier physics letter journal and the American Physical Society’s flagship publication. Since 1958 it has contributed to APS’s mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics by publishing seminal research by Nobel Prize–winning and other distinguished researchers in all fields of physics.
PRL publishes short, high-quality reports of the most influential developments and transformative ideas in the full arc of fundamental, applied and interdisciplinary physics research. It is distinctive in the depth and breadth of its coverage of the broad subfields of physics. PRL welcomes manuscripts that report on pivotal advances that will influence the research of others. All published Letters meet at least one of its strict acceptance criteria.
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRL is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This commitment ensures that its mission and standards prioritize the needs of researchers and authors, not commercial publishing interests. The journal is international, with approximately three-quarters of published Letters originating from outside the U.S. Physical Review’s reach is far and wide, with authors and referees from over 130 countries.
PRL covers the full range of applied, fundamental, and interdisciplinary physics research topics, encoded in our list of sections and subsections:
Submitted manuscripts should substantially advance fundamental or applied physical science by meeting one or more of the following criteria:
At the core of APS's mission is a commitment to meeting the needs of physicists, a community that has been at the leading edge of open access. As a result, APS supports a variety of sustainable access options:
PRL authors gain high visibility, rapid publication, and achieve broad dissemination of their work in the most cited journal in physics. PRL earns one citation every 80 seconds, for a total of 427,669 in 2016. The editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
The PRL editorial board is a diverse, global group of active, distinguished scientists, selected by editors in consultation with APS units appointed by the Executive Editor. They serve as divisional associate editors (DAEs) for three-year terms. DAEs may be requested by the editors to advise at any stage of the review process and they serve as adjudicators in formal appeals.
PRL is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRL acceptance criteria.
All Physical Review journals, including Reviews of Modern Physics, follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRL is published electronically one article at a time. The print version of the journal is published weekly. Articles are identified by volume number and a six digit article number, for example, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 254101 (2017).
PRL editors accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.