About the Virtual Journals Series

The Virtual Journals in the Physical Sciences series has been jointly developed by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical Society (APS). Each Virtual Journal presents an online collection of relevant papers from a broad range of source journals in the physical sciences. Participating source journals include all journals published by APS and AIP, as well as a significant number of journals from other participating publishers, both on AIP's Scitation platform and on other platforms. From the user's perspective, the Virtual Journals look and feel like "real" journals, providing useful features such as:

• Tables of Contents
• Freely available abstracts
• Links to source journal home pages, abstracts, and full-text articles
• Searching the Virtual Journals
• E-mail alerting
• RSS feeds

Subscribers to the source journal will be able to seamlessly access the full-text articles, while non-subscribers will have the option to purchase articles for immediate online delivery. Subscribers also have the ability to search across all issues of the Virtual Journals.

Underlying objectives of the Virtual Journals series are to provide:

• Quick access to large sets of papers in cutting-edge fields
• Affordable access to those with specialized interests
• Alerts about newly published research in key areas

Articles appearing in these Virtual Journals are selected by editors expert in the particular fields. Additional Virtual Journals will be launched as warranted, focusing on new and developing fields that cut across a range of traditional Publications.