Wednesday, January 31, 2018

The Physical Review journals landmark papers: fluid dynamics?

The Physical Review series of journals, published by the American Physical Society (APS), is celebrating its 125th anniversary by making a curated set of landmark papers available for free download here.  DTLR encourages readers to take a look.

The question I'd like to ask here is, how many of these milestone papers are on fluid dynamics?  I found only one, the 1986 paper by Frisch, Hasslacher, and Pomeau introducing lattice gas cellular automata (LGCA).  This is a computational method for simulating fluid flow described by the Navier-Stokes equations.

Of course, the papers by Onsager (1931, in 2 parts) on reciprocal relations in irreversible processes, has some relevance, for instance to mass diffusion.  Superfluids are represented by the observation of superfluidity in liquid helium-3 by Osheroff, Lee, and Richardson (1972), and the prediction of topological phase in 2D superfluids by Nelson and Kosterlitz (1977).  In condensed matter physics, the prediction of a hexatic phase, between solid and liquid, was predicted by Halperin and Nelson (1978) in their theory of 2D melting.  These are not really papers on fluid dynamics per se, but certainly related.

However, for the most part, the great achievements in classical fluid dynamics have not generally been published in the Physical Review series of journals.  In 1970 the Physical Review was split into four sections, with section A covering "General Physics" including fluid dynamics.  When Physical Review E was founded in 1993, fluid dynamics and plasma physics moved to this new journal, along with other topics such as statistical, nonlinear, and biological physics, and more recently soft matter.  In 2016 it was joined by a new journal, Physical Review Fluids, created due to the mass defection of the editorial board of Physics of Fluids due to disagreements with the publisher (the American Institute of Physics, AIP).  Of course, Physical Review Letters and Reviews of Modern Physics have occasionally included fluid dynamics papers.


However, for much of the post-World War II era, the two most elite journals in fluid dynamics research have been the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (founded in 1956, published by Cambridge University Press) and Physics of Fluids (founded in 1958), neither of which belong to the APS family of journals.  The various engineering societies also have journals that cover fluid dynamics, and a number of commercial publishers have journals in the field as well.  This is one reason why so few fluid dynamics papers show up in the APS list of milestone papers.  I've certainly read and enjoyed many fluid dynamics papers from the Physical Review family, but apparently none but Frisch et al. (1986) makes it onto the list of landmarks (which, the editors assure us, is so elite that several Nobel Prize-cited papers didn't make it either).

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