Previously I wrote about the Physical Review family journals' landmark papers. In this month's APS News, one of these journals, Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, Biological, and Soft Matter Physics, notes that it is celebrating its 25th year. They have posted a series of 25th anniversary milestone papers, one for each year since its founding in 1993. At the time of writing, they're up to 2011, with 6 more years to go. Moreover, I found that in 2015, they celebrated the publication of their 50,000th paper by posting another list of milestone papers. Both lists were compiled by the editors (and editorial board) for making important/significant contributions to their field.
I will ask the same question I asked in my earlier post: how many are papers in fluid dynamics? After all, PRE's original subtitle was Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics. Of course, many of the papers in both PRE milestone lists are related, and in some cases closely related, to fluid mechanics, broadly understood. I won't have the space to talk about all of them here.
The most important fluid dynamics paper seems to be one that appears in both PRE milestone lists: Shan & Chen (1993), "Lattice Boltzmann model for simulating flows with multiple phases and components," appearing in the first year of the journal's life. The 2015 milestone list includes a second fluid dynamics paper, also from the first year of the journal's life: Benzi et al. (1993), "Extended self-similarity in turbulent flows." Finally, the 2018 milestone list features Baskaran & Marchetti (2008), "Hydrodynamics of self-propelled hard rods," motivated by observations of gliding bacteria. The latter paper could also be considered part of biological physics. The 2018 list has not been completed at time of writing, so I may need to post an update when the series is complete.
For reasons discussed in my earlier note, PRE does not seem to be part of the group of the most elite fluid dynamics journals, consisting of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Physics of Fluids, and new arrival Physical Review Fluids (PRF). Indeed, with the arrival of PRF in the Physical Review family, Physical Review E's role in the fluid dynamics community could become diminished, though its mission statement continues to include both complex fluids and fluid dynamics. I checked PRE's website today, and the editorial board continues to have members covering fluid dynamics. We'll see in the future whether some kind of equilibrium is reached between the two journals.
