''Physical Review A'' (also known as PRA) is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society covering

atomic, molecular, and optical physics Atomic, molecular, and optical physics (AMO) is the study of matter-matter and light-matter interactions; at the scale of one or a few atoms and energy scales around several electron volts. The three areas are closely interrelated. AMO theory in ...

and

quantum information Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both t ...

. the editor was Jan M. Rost (

Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems The Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex systems is one of the 80 institutes of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, located in Dresden, Germany. Research The research at the institute in the field of the physics of complex systems rang ...

History

In 1893, the '' Physical Review'' was established at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

. It was taken over by the American Physical Society (formed in 1899) in 1913. In 1970, ''Physical Review'' was subdivided into ''Physical Review A'', ''B'', ''C'', and ''D''. At that time section ''A'' was subtitled ''Physical Review A: General Physics''. In 1990 a process was started to split this journal into two, resulting in the creation of ''

Physical Review E ''Physical Review E'' is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal, published monthly by the American Physical Society. The main field of interest is collective phenomena of many-body systems. It is currently edited by Uwe C. Täuber. While original ...

'' in 1993. Hence, in 1993, ''Physical Review A'' changed its statement of scope to ''Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.'' In January 2007, the section of ''Physical Review E'' that published papers on

classical optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

was merged into ''Physical Review A'', unifying the classical and quantum parts of

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultrav ...

into a single journal. In 2016, ''Physical Review A'' broadened its formal statement of coverage to explicitly include quantum information, which has been a section within the journal since 1998.

Rapid Communications

''Physical Review A Rapid Communications'' was introduced in 1981 to provide a venue for quick publication of high-impact articles similar to ''

Physical Review Letters ''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...

'', but for a more specialized audience. As of May 1, 2012, the editors have made more explicit the requirement for significance in Rapid articles. In addition, as of March 8, 2010, the editors have placed newly published Rapid Communications articles on rotation as highlights on the ''Physical Review A'' website, so as to give them more visibility.

Editors' Suggestions

In August 2013, ''Physical Review A'' started marking a small number of papers published in the journal which the editors find to be of particular interest, importance, or clarity as Editors’ Suggestions to give them higher visibility.

Abstracting and indexing

Physical Review journals were abstracted and indexed in: *

Chemical Abstracts Service CAS (formerly Chemical Abstracts Service) is a division of the American Chemical Society. It is a source of chemical information. CAS is located in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Print periodicals ''Chemical Abstracts'' is a periodical index t ...

/ CASSI * Inspec *

Clarivate Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for ph ...

Web of Science *

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

* INSPIRE-HEP *

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Astrophysics Data System The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 16 million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources. Abstracts are available free online for almost all articles, and full scanned ...

(ADS) *

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain t ...

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collec ...

'', the journal had an

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 3.989 in 2020.

References

External links

* {{American Physical Society Publications established in 1970 English-language journals Quantum information science Optics journals American Physical Society academic journals Monthly journals