Physical Review Materials Publishes First Papers

The first articles to appear in Physical Review Materials, the newest addition to the APS journal family, were published on June 19, and judging from the response, the publication is off to a healthy start.

From the beginning, the journal has been envisioned as a broad-scope international journal for high-quality papers from physicists, materials scientists, chemists, engineers, and researchers in related disciplines.

"The first batch of papers is just great, and they cover all the bases for us," said the journal’s Lead Editor Chris Leighton. "In terms of subject matter, areas like energy storage materials and energy conversion, 2D materials, and nanomaterials are all hot areas."

Leighton is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and a graduate faculty member in Physics at the University of Minnesota. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in condensed matter physics at the University of Durham in the UK, and carried out post-doctoral research at the University of California San Diego. His research deals with the electronic and magnetic properties of a wide range of novel materials, including complex oxides, oxide heterostructures, metallic spintronics, complex alloys, organic conductors, and photovoltaics. He is a Fellow of the APS, and is Chair of the Topical Group on Magnetism and its Applications (GMAG).

"I am proud and excited to be the inaugural Lead Editor of PR Materials," Leighton wrote in an editorial accompanying the first issue. "The APS and PR Materials staff have been hard at work for the last two months handling a volume of submissions that already indicates significant interest from the community. Managing Editor Athanasios Chantis, Editor Mu Wang, along with myself as Lead Editor, provide a mix of expert professional editors and research scientists active in the community, which we plan to maintain as the journal expands." The journal is backed by an Editorial Board of 22 researchers from the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia, representing universities, national laboratories, user facilities, and research institutes.

"We definitely have people who are already publishing in APS journals, but we also want to bring in people from outside the APS community," Leighton emphasized. "It’s a very interdisciplinary field — people from physics, materials science, or even engineering or chemistry — and they don’t necessarily have a home right now in the APS journals to publish their work."

Visit the journal website at journals.aps.org/prmaterials