22 March, 2009

Chemical Physics vs Physical Chemistry

At one of the last conferences I've attended, we've got a nice informal discussion about a usual subject "what is the difference between physical chemistry and chemical physics". We concluded that there might be a following way to distinguish between those. If you measure/calculate the reaction cross section, you are definitely a chemical physicist. But, if you multiply the cross section by the velocity, and therefore measure/calculate the reaction rate, you belong to the physical chemistry community. What is your opinion on that?

13 March, 2009

Is PRL Too Large to Have an ‘‘Impact’’?

Recently there was published a PRL Editorial with such a title. The main message is that only a small fraction of Letters are really highly cited - if one publishes them separately, they will have an impact factor of about 20, while PRL's number is about 7. So, this might be a good idea to reject more papers and accept only revolutionary contributions. However, the problem is that nobody can actually predict how many times a given article will be cited in a few years...

A terrific lectures course

If you work in AMO physics and you are out of reading, here is an excellent course in modern atomic and optical physics by Misha Lukin (Harvard) - the first link here.