SIGNIFICANT EVENTS - SCIENCE EVENTS
06/20/03

Countdown of 10 Most-cited Articles in Physical Review Letters

An ongoing countdown of the 10 most cited articles in Physical Review Letters has twice described articles written by scientists in the Fundamental Physics family of researchers. James Riordon's series of feature articles in APS News "...is not just a mad desire to mimic David Letterman or the DJ on the local radio station. We want to provide some insight into what makes these papers significant and how they came to be written." The 10th-most-cited article is "Unity of All Elementary-Particle Forces" by H. Georgi and S. L. Glashow, Phys. Rev. Lett. 32, 438 (1974) (1946 citations), Glashow being a co-investigator on a relativity physics task underway at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The June issue of Physics News states that "Ground State of the Electron Gas by a Stochastic Method" by D. M. Ceperley and B. J. Alder, Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 566 (1980) (3548 citations) is the 3rd-most cited article in PRL. David Ceperley is a PI performing theoretical calculations related to condensed matter low temperature physics in the FP ground-based research program. Riordon's countdown feature articles can be found in the archive site at http://www.aps.org/apsnews/topten.html.