Happy new year from Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics!

By Isabelle Auffret-Babak on January 13, 2017

2017 kicks off the golden jubilee year for JPhysB as we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of our J Phys series, but before we really start the festivities, I want to reflect on the great research that was published in the journal in 2016 and thank both our authors for trusting us to publish their results and our referees for their continued support.

We launched Letters last year and were happy to receive, from the start, a wide diversity of content ranging from the demonstration of a Faraday laser to the presentation of research related to trilobite states in atomic hydrogen via the resolution of proton-hydrogen scattering open issues and the analysis of interactions and decay of three-level Rydberg atoms. We published 12 Letters in 2016 and hope to grow this high-profile section in the year(s) to come. Looking at the end of the year data for 2016, Letters have received the highest amount of downloads, on average per article, compared with other article-types, reflecting their broad appeal to the community. If you are interested in publishing a Letter in JPhysB, please remember that all Letters are run for suitability past JPhysB Editorial Board members. Those articles that do not satisfy the strict high-impact and presentation-of-outstanding-research criteria, may still be considered for publication as regular papers.

We published our first Special Issues following an incremental publication model: Coherence and Control in the Quantum World, providing an extensive overview of the ongoing effort to push the boundaries of quantum coherent control, Imaging the dynamic structure of matter, presenting a snapshot of the attempts to develop & apply electron and x-ray sources to gain an understanding of the dynamic structure of matter and Frontiers of Free-Electrons Laser Science Series II, compiling works carried out at the world’s new accelerator-based short-wavelength free-electron laser (FEL) facilities. This incremental publication model is allowing much more flexibility for our authors as far as submission deadlines are concerned. More special issues are currently nearing completion just as we begin receiving contributions to our Special Issue on Problems of Light Energy Conversion, Light Harvesting and Roll over hydrogen: a fundamental system in all states.

JPhysB attracted many high-profile review articles, some of which have been published within one of our special issues. You can view the whole list of Topical reviews, Tutorials and Invited papers published in 2016 as well as each article type’s description by clicking on this link. It is again quite remarkable to note the breadth of the content appearing in this section, which we hope becomes an essential tool for the AMO community as a whole. Suggestions for preparing one of these articles can be made to our office using the form appended below at any time, and will systematically be run past the JPhysB Editorial Board to ensure consistency with our quality standards.

2 articles were press released in the course of the year, namely Design of a high-flux instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy by D Filippetto and H Qian, presenting properties of a new instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction and imaging and Stereochemical configuration and selective excitation of the chiral molecule halothane by Martin Pitzer et al using coincidence experiments in order to determine the absolute configuration of a chiral molecule. Our new partnership with Altmetric in the course of 2016 could not have come at a better time, as JPhysB authors have since been able to check the online impact of their works, looking at how their articles are discussed on social media, online reference managers and regular/mainstream media. We are already working on our first press release for 2017, so ‘stay tuned ‘to see what’s coming up next in this area.

Last but not least, with the help of the JPhysB Editorial Board, we have been completing work on the Highlights of 2016 collection which will be featuring more outstanding content. We look forward to announcing the final selection of articles in the coming weeks. In the mean time, it is still possible to view the Highlights of 2015, by clicking here. Should you want to access more IOP Publishing content dedicated to this subject area, we invite you to please visit our atomic and molecular subject collection page as we will be updating this page on a regular basis.