Too Legit? Too Legit to Qubit?

Physical Review Letters has changed their sections around. Previously, quantum information was in the last section “Interdisciplinary Physics: Biological Physics, Quantum Information, etc.” For the more fundamental oriented papers, one would sometimes also submit to “General Physics.” Now quantum information has been moved to the new first section “General Physics: Statistical and Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Information, etc.”
Is this a good thing? Since I am nothing if but a bag of poorly thought out opinions I will spew out some here. (1) It is nice to see that quantum information is consider a part of “General Physics.” “Interdisciplinary physics” seems a way to say, well there were these good physicists, and then they took interest in this other field which has overlap outside of physics, and since we liked these physicists we let them publish here. If I look at this move as acknowledging that quantum information has intrinsic value to physics, then I get goosebumps all over (sadly doubling the amount of stimulation I’ve had all day.) (2) The old “General Physics” section was notoriously harder to get papers accepted into if they had a quantum information tilt. Generally (err) this was because the papers submitted there were of a more foundational nature, and well, let’s not even go there. Will the movement of quantum information to general physics make it easier for foundational people to get published?

2 Replies to “Too Legit? Too Legit to Qubit?”

  1. What do you think about the statistics of Quantum Information papers with respect to other fields. Maybe it is the increase in number that has triggered the change?
    On a slightly lower note: I was told (by who?) that the specialized journals in quantum information processing would be bad things, as they would separate this scientific activity from physics, computer science and engineering, so that the whole thing might be lost due to overspecialization. I can’t fully agree. This is how I see it coming for the next 5-15 years, which is too short for any overspecialization to occur: [1] Either some significant progress is made in implementations, which will strongly decouple the engineering sector, [2] or the physics part will converge more closer to the main body of physics and mathematical physics and physicists will try to incorporate more of it into the standard classroom material to save it! I guess these are trivialities anyway…

  2. I used to subscribe to the “if we start specialized journals won’t all hell break lose” theory. But now I’m not so sure. It seems that people are still really eager to publish in PRL and PRA, and the specialized journals have soaked up a small number of papers. The # of articles in PRL is probably the more important number for visibility.

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