Letters to the Editor

The Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Editorial Board has reassessed the purpose of a Letter to the Editor. This follows a discussion by the Board that highlighted the change in the way that the community uses Letters. Originally the idea of a Letter was to publish urgent work that required a follow-up paper containing more details. However, increasingly, authors are using Letters as a way to publish small amounts of work that they feel requires fast publication but does not necessarily require a follow-up paper. The Board believes that the definition of a Letter has become very blurred and needs to be redefined.

In addition to the new definition, the Board has introduced additional quality checks and restrictions that authors and referees should be aware of. These are set out below.

New definition of a Letter to the Editor

A Letter should present new results, likely to stimulate further research and be of interest to the wider atomic, molecular and optical physics community. Above all the results should be sufficiently new and important to merit rapid publication as a Letter, which implies accelerated refereeing procedures. This should be made clear either in the body of the Letter, if appropriate, or with a supporting cover letter from the author on submission to the journal.

Letters will have an upper limit of 8 journal pages and, as an additional quality check, two referees instead of one will be used to review them. The Board will be asked to make a final publication decision in the event of two conflicting reports.

With these measures in place it is hoped that the important new results will receive the exposure they deserve as a Letter.

Journal scope

The different types of research classed as atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics have changed over the past few years. As the field of AMO physics has evolved, with researchers moving into more interdisciplinary research areas, so has J. Phys. B, evolving along with the research communities to provide a high-quality outlet for their work. J. Phys. B covers all aspects of atomic, molecular and optical physics. From the traditional studies of atomic properties to the new nanotechnology interfaces, if the system under investigation involves manipulation on an atomic or molecular level, then it will fall within the J. Phys. B scope. We currently publish articles across a wide range of research and we continue to encourage articles from newer areas relating to AMO as well as the core AMO research that we have always published in the journal.

Following a recent internal report that highlighted these changes in AMO research it was decided to modify the journal scope to reflect this, and also to provide an additional extended scope to show the wide range of articles published within the journal. This extended scope is available online on the journal homepage at www.iop.org/journals/jphysb but we also show it here for your information.

To continue to serve the AMO community, the journal must continue to evolve to meet the needs of that community. To this end the J. Phys. B Publishing team and Board are always open to suggestions of new topics of interest that will complement our tradition of publishing high-quality AMO physics.

Extended journal scope

J. Phys. B covers all aspects of atomic, molecular and optical physics. We publish articles on the study of atoms, ions, molecules, condensates or clusters, from their structure and interactions with particles, photons, fields and surfaces to all aspects of spectroscopy. Quantum optics, non-linear optics, laser physics, astrophysics, plasma physics, chemical physics, optical cooling and trapping and other investigations where the objects of study are the elementary atomic, ionic or molecular properties of processes are also included.

With the introduction of the BEC Matters! portal and IOP Select, J. Phys. B, one of the major contributors, offers authors of articles in this research area wider visibility and more flexible publication with the opportunity to display multimedia attachments or web links to key groups and results.

Recent papers reflect the wide scope of J. Phys. B:

Calculation of cross sections for very low-energy hydrogen-antihydrogen scattering using the Kohn variational method
E A G Armour and C W Chamberlain
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 22 (28 November 2002) L489-L494

Imaging the electron transfer reaction of Ne²⁺ with Ar using position-sensitive coincidence spectroscopy
Sarah M Harper, Wan-Ping Hu and Stephen D Price
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 21 (14 November 2002) 4409-4423

Ultraviolet-infrared wavelength scalings for strong field induced L-shell emissions from Kr and Xe clusters
Alex B Borisov, Xiangyang Song, Fabrizio Frigeni, Yang Dai, Yevgeniya Koshman, W Andreas Schroeder, Jack Davis, Keith Boyer and Charles K Rhodes
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 21 (14 November 2002) L461-L467

A Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice
J Hecker Denschlag, J E Simsarian, H Häffner, C McKenzie, A Browaeys, D Cho, K Helmerson, S L Rolston and W D Phillips
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 14 (28 July 2002) 3095-3110

Locality of a class of entangled states
I R Senitzky
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 14 (28 July 2002) 3029-3039

Solitons and vortices in ultracold fermionic gases
Tomasz Karpiuk, Miroslaw Brewczyk and Kazimierz Rzazewski
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 14 (28 July 2002) L315-L321

Stable islands in chaotic atom-optics billiards, caused by curved trajectories
M F Andersen, A Kaplan, N Friedman and N Davidson
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 9 (14 May 2002) 2183-2190

Emission probability and photon statistics of a coherently driven mazer
Jin Xiong and Zhi-Ming Zhang
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 9 (14 May 2002) 2159-2172

The Li⁺-H₂ system in a rigid-rotor approximation: potential energy surface and transport coefficients
I Røeggen, H R Skullerud, T H Løvaas and D K Dysthe
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 7 (14 April 2002) 1707-1725

The stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation
C W Gardiner, J R Anglin and T I A Fudge
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 6 (28 March 2002) 1555-1582

Oxygen ion impurity in the TEXTOR tokamak boundary plasma observed and analysed by Zeeman spectroscopy
J D Hey, C C Chu, S Brezinsek, Ph Mertens and B Unterberg
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 6 (28 March 2002) 1525-1553

Electron-hexafluoropropene (C₃F₆) scattering at intermediate energies
Czeslaw Szmytkowski, Pawel Mozejko and Stanislaw Kwitnewski
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 5 (14 March 2002) 1267-1274

High-resolution investigations of C₂ and CN optical emissions in laser-induced plasmas during graphite ablation
S Acquaviva and M L De Giorgi
J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. Vol 35, No 4 (28 February 2002) 795-806

If you have any questions or comments on this or anything relating to the journal please contact Nicola Gulley, Publisher, J. Phys. B (E-mail: jphysb@iop.org).