Nature Physics

About Nature Physics

Journal Overview

Nature Physics is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio that publishes what it describes as the highest-quality research across all areas of physics, pure and applied (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026). A defining feature of the journal is that every editorial decision is made by a team of full-time professional editors rather than external academic editors (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The correct ISO abbreviation for abstracting and indexing purposes is Nat. Phys., with print ISSN 1745-2473 and electronic ISSN 1745-2481 (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Now in its third decade of publication — the September 2026 issue is Volume 22, Issue 9 (source: nature.com/nphys/, accessed 10 Oct 2026) — the journal covers the full sweep of the discipline, from quantum mechanics, condensed-matter physics and optics to thermodynamics, particle physics and biophysics (secondary summary: Wikipedia citing the journal's scope page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). It publishes primary research alongside Reviews, Perspectives, News & Views, Commentaries, Features, Book Reviews, Correspondence and editorials. Its 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 18.0 places it fourth among 86 journals in the Journal Citation Reports category "Physics, Multidisciplinary" (secondary summary: Wikipedia citing Journal Citation Reports, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

History

The journal's submission system opened in March 2005, and Nature Physics was launched on 1 October 2005, with the first issue establishing what the editors called "the mix of research, reviews and comment that has characterized the journal ever since" (source: nature.com editorial "Now we are five", Nat. Phys. 6, 2010, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The timing was deliberate: 2005 was the international "year of physics," marking the centenary of Albert Einstein's seminal 1905 papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity (source: nature.com editorial "Now we are five", accessed 10 Oct 2026).

The journal arrived on the physics publishing scene just as graphene was emerging as a transformative topic — in 2004, just before the launch, Andrei Geim and colleagues had reported a straightforward way to isolate the material, and the 5th-anniversary editorial singled out graphene alongside topological insulators, magnetic monopoles, supersolids and Wigner crystals as the "exotic matter" stars of the journal's first five years (source: nature.com editorial "Now we are five", accessed 10 Oct 2026).

The first year closed with an anniversary collection, "First-year highlights," drawing from the first 12 issues, with the lead commentary by Gilles Brassard asking whether quantum information science holds the key to understanding the quantum world (source: nature.com/nphys/focus/1st_anniversary, accessed 10 Oct 2026). In January 2009, with the first issue of Volume 5, the journal introduced a redesigned page layout shared with its sister titles Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics and Nature Geoscience; the editorial team at the time comprised Alison Wright, Edmund Gerstner, May Chiao, Andreas Trabesinger and David Gevaux (source: nature.com editorial "2009 and all that", Nat. Phys. 5, 1, 2009, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

By September 2015 the journal had received more than 17,800 manuscript submissions in total, of which roughly 1,300 had been published — a figure the editors disclosed in a 10th-anniversary editorial. Submissions had grown steadily: an average of 75 papers per month in 2006 rising to 200 per month in 2014, dominated by the USA, China, Germany, Japan and the UK (source: nature.com editorial "Ten", Nat. Phys. 11, 2015, accessed 10 Oct 2026). A 2015 special collection, "Ten years of Nature Physics," highlighted decade-defining developments across the field (source: nature.com/nphys collection page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The journal celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2025, including the retrospective "The first eight" (Nat. Phys. 21, 1508–1511, published 13 Oct 2025), authored by the editorial team (source: nature.com/articles/s41567-025-03059-5, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Aims & Scope

The journal describes itself as a monthly publication of the highest-quality research in all areas of physics, both pure and applied, with all editorial decisions made by a full-time professional editorial team (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026). In practice, its scope spans the core physics disciplines and topical coverage connected to them — in the editors' own framing, the investigation of nature and its substances "from atomic to cosmological scales," including observations, interactions and forces and their effects within natural systems (secondary summary of the journal's aims, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Subject areas the journal covers include quantum mechanics, condensed-matter physics, optics and photonics, thermodynamics, particle physics and biophysics, as well as interdisciplinary work at the interfaces of these fields (secondary summary: Wikipedia citing the journal's scope page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Content types go well beyond primary research: the journal publishes Articles, Letters, Review Articles, News & Views, Perspectives, Commentaries, Features, book reviews and Correspondence, giving it a broad editorial voice in the physics community (source: nature.com/nphys/content types page, accessed 10 Oct 2026; TechXplore journal listing, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Editorial Team

All editorial decisions are made by full-time professional editors based in the journal's offices in Berlin, London, Milan and Shanghai (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The team as listed on the journal's official editors page comprises:

• Chief Editor — David Abergel, PhD. Joined Nature Physics in 2017 after theoretical research on graphene and other two-dimensional materials and topological materials. He completed a PhD at Lancaster University in 2007, undertook postdoctoral work at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and the University of Maryland (USA), and then an Assistant Professorship at Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, Sweden. He is based in the Berlin office (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Senior Editor and Team Leader — Stefanie Reichert, PhD. Joined in 2018; obtained her PhD from the University of Manchester studying particle–antiparticle transitions at the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, followed by a postdoc in the LHCb group at TU Dortmund. Based in Berlin (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Senior Editors: Leonardo Benini, PhD (joined July 2021; PhD from the University of Warwick on localization in strongly disordered many-body systems; Milan office); Richard Brierley, PhD (joined from Nature Communications in 2020; PhD in condensed matter theory from Cambridge on polariton condensates; postdoctoral work at Yale on superconducting quantum computing; London office); Debarchan Das, PhD (joined January 2023; PhD from IIT Kanpur on iron pnictide and heavy-fermion superconductors; postdoctoral research in Wrocław, Poland, and at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland; Berlin office); Elizaveta Dubrovina, PhD (rejoined January 2022 from Nature Communications; PhD from Imperial College London on fluid dynamics of lab-on-chip devices; London office); Lishu Wu, PhD (joined January 2025 from Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering; PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on optical properties of 2D materials and heterostructures; Shanghai office) (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Associate Editor — Sonal Mistry, PhD. Joined February 2025; doctoral studies at the Daresbury Laboratory (UK) on photocathode development for electron accelerators, then the High Brightness Beams group at HZB in Berlin; handles the journal's optics and photonics content. Based in Berlin (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Nature Physics operates on the Nature Portfolio model: professional in-house editors assess every submission, deciding whether to send a manuscript for external peer review or to decline it without review (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The journal's official journal-metrics page reports a median of 11 days from submission to first editorial decision, and a median of 195 days from submission to acceptance (which includes all peer review and revision time) (source: nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

The journal's editorial policies cover authorship, competing interests, confidentiality, corrections and retractions, research ethics, image integrity, peer review, plagiarism and duplicate publication, preprints and conference proceedings, press and embargo policies, reporting standards and data availability, appeals and complaints, and artificial-intelligence use (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-policies, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Notably, the journal supports the posting of preprints: its policy states that manuscript content must not significantly overlap with other papers under consideration elsewhere, but preprints are explicitly supported (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-policies, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

The journal does not publish a current acceptance rate. The most recent published acceptance-related figures are historical: the 10th-anniversary editorial in 2015 reported over 17,800 submissions received since launch, with roughly 1,300 published — and submission geography dominated by the USA, China, Germany, Japan and the UK, while the best "accept rates" (accepted relative to submitted manuscripts) were associated with Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, the USA and the Netherlands (source: nature.com editorial "Ten", Nat. Phys. 11, 2015, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Metrics: Impact Factor, Citations, Speed and Usage

The journal publishes a full official metrics dashboard, with the following figures for 2025 (source: nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, accessed 10 Oct 2026):

The journal ranks fourth out of 86 journals in the Journal Citation Reports category "Physics, Multidisciplinary" (secondary summary: Wikipedia citing Journal Citation Reports, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Springer Nature, the publisher, is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the journal's metrics page notes that citation measures such as the two-year Impact Factor "are not necessarily measures of journal quality," encouraging authors and readers to consider a range of metrics (source: nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Submission Guidelines

The standard format for primary research is the Article: main text of up to 3,000 words (excluding abstract, Methods, references and figure captions), an unreferenced abstract of up to 200 words, up to 6 display items (figures and/or tables), up to 10 online-only Extended Data items, figure captions under 350 words, up to 3,000 additional Methods words appearing online only, and up to 50 references. Articles carry received and accepted dates and are peer reviewed (source: nature.com/nphys content types page, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

As with other Nature journals, initial submissions are flexible in format: authors are encouraged to incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single PDF or Word file, with line numbers; LaTeX files are accepted at the acceptance stage rather than initial submission (source: nature.com "Initial submission" guidance, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Authors must comply with the journal's editorial policies before submission — covering authorship, funding, competing interests, image integrity, data and code availability, and AI use (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-policies, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The submission system is the Springer Nature editorial manuscript system linked from the journal homepage; presubmission enquiries go through the journal's editors (contact details on the editors page).

APC and Open Access Options

The journal's non-primary articles (such as Reviews, News & Views and Comment) are not eligible for open access and are published only via the subscription route (source: nature.com/nphys content types page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). For primary research articles, authors can choose open access, with an article processing charge (APC) determined at acceptance. The journal does not publish a single standalone standard APC figure on its journal pages (as verified on 10 Oct 2026).

Nature Physics has also trialled a Guided Open Access publishing model alongside Nature Genetics, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Communications Biology and Communications Physics. Under the pilot, authors make one submission and the editors of three physics venues (Nature Physics, Nature Communications, Communications Physics) collaboratively assess which is the best fit, with a handling editor guiding the author through review and an Editorial Assessment Report. The pilot charges an Editorial Assessment Charge of €2,190 (applied only for papers sent out for review), and manuscripts accepted in Nature Physics or Nature Communications then pay a top-up APC of €2,600 (versus €800 for Communications Physics) (source: nature.com editorial "A guide for open access", Nat. Phys., accessed 10 Oct 2026). Authors should check the journal's current open-access and pricing pages before submitting, as APC figures are subject to change and may be covered by institutional agreements.

Key Facts at a Glance

(Sources for the table: nature.com/nphys/about, nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, nature.com editorial "Now we are five" — all accessed 10 Oct 2026 — plus the indexing summary above.)

Landmark Discoveries and Notable Papers

Nature Physics's own anniversary retrospectives identify several field-defining contributions published in its pages (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics" collection, accessed 10 Oct 2026):

• Three-dimensional topological insulators. In 2009, two papers — a Letter by Xia et al. and an Article by Zhang et al. — provided what a later retrospective called "the first unambiguous examples of three-dimensional topological insulators," bulk insulators with metallic surface states hosting massless Dirac electrons; these now form just one of many classes of topological materials (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics": "Not trivial to realize" by Joel E. Moore, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Cavity optomechanics / resolved-sideband cooling. A 2008 paper by Schliesser et al. first demonstrated resolved-sideband cooling of mechanical resonators, an atomic-physics-inspired technique that made possible cooling mechanical motion to the ground state and subsequent advances in cavity optomechanics (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics": "Frozen motion" by Ania Bleszynski Jayich, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Magnetic reconnection. Two observational studies published in the journal provided early evidence for magnetic-reconnection mechanisms in three dimensions and in a turbulent medium (Xiao et al. Article; Retinò et al. Letter) (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics": "Reconnecting with two good friends" by Ellen Zweibel, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• 2D materials beyond graphene. A series of 2011 papers showed that in trilayer graphene, the stacking arrangement — not just the layer count — determines when few-layer structures become truly two-dimensional (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics": "The ABC of 2D materials" by Alberto F. Morpurgo, accessed 10 Oct 2026).
• Numerical approaches to correlated electrons. The journal traced how numerical methods moved from the periphery to the center of the high-temperature superconductivity problem (source: nature.com "Ten years of Nature Physics": "Numerical models come of age" by E. Gull & A. J. Millis, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

The journal also curates dedicated collections around the annual Nobel Prizes — for example, a 2025 collection marking the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit (source: nature.com/nphys/collections, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Nature Portfolio Family Context

Nature Physics is one of the Nature-branded research journals published by Nature Portfolio, the portfolio of journals, databases and services published by Springer Nature (source: nature.com, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Its closest siblings were named in the journal's 2009 redesign editorial as Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics and Nature Geoscience (source: nature.com editorial "2009 and all that", accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Within physics, the portfolio offers a tiered ecosystem: Nature Physics and the flagship Nature sit at the most selective end for primary physics research, with Nature Communications and Communications Physics as broader broad-scope physics venues — the three explicitly operate together in the journal's Guided Open Access pilot (source: nature.com editorial "A guide for open access", accessed 10 Oct 2026). Nature Reviews Physics, launched later, is a separate non-primary venue: it publishes only Reviews, News & Views and Comment articles, has no gold open-access option, and charges no publication fee (source: nature.com/natrevphys/publishing-model, accessed 10 Oct 2026). The physics community therefore encounters a ladder of Nature Portfolio outlets, with Nature Physics serving as the flagship discipline-specific journal for physics itself.

FAQs

What is Nature Physics?

Nature Physics is a monthly peer-reviewed journal from Nature Portfolio publishing what it calls the highest-quality research in all areas of physics, pure and applied, with editorial decisions made by full-time professional editors (source: nature.com/nphys/about, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

When was Nature Physics launched?

The first issue appeared on 1 October 2005, during the international "year of physics" celebrating the centenary of Einstein's 1905 papers. The submission system had opened in March 2005 (source: nature.com editorial "Now we are five", accessed 10 Oct 2026).

What is the impact factor of Nature Physics?

The 2025 Journal Impact Factor is 18.0, with a 5-year Impact Factor of 21.5 (source: nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, accessed 10 Oct 2026). It ranks fourth of 86 journals in the JCR category "Physics, Multidisciplinary" (secondary summary citing Journal Citation Reports, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Who is the Chief Editor of Nature Physics?

David Abergel, PhD, who joined the journal in 2017 after theoretical physics research on graphene, two-dimensional and topological materials (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

How long does peer review take at Nature Physics?

The journal reports a median of 11 days from submission to first editorial decision and 195 days from submission to acceptance, including peer review and revision time (source: nature.com/nphys/journal-impact, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

What is the acceptance rate of Nature Physics?

The journal does not publish a current acceptance rate. The only published acceptance-related figures are historical: by September 2015, over 17,800 manuscripts had been received and roughly 1,300 published since launch (source: nature.com editorial "Ten", Nat. Phys. 11, 2015, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

What are the formatting requirements for an Article?

Up to 3,000 words of main text, a 200-word unreferenced abstract, up to 6 display items, up to 10 online-only Extended Data items, up to 50 references, and Methods of up to 3,000 additional words (source: nature.com/nphys content types page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). Initial submissions are format-flexible — a single PDF or Word file with line numbers is sufficient (source: nature.com "Initial submission", accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Is Nature Physics open access?

Primary research articles can be published open access (APC determined at acceptance); non-primary content (Reviews, News & Views, Comment) is subscription-only (source: nature.com/nphys content types page, accessed 10 Oct 2026). A Guided Open Access pilot across Nature Physics, Nature Communications and Communications Physics charges an Editorial Assessment Charge of €2,190 for papers sent to review, plus a €2,600 top-up APC for papers accepted in Nature Physics (source: nature.com editorial "A guide for open access", accessed 10 Oct 2026). The journal does not publish a standalone standard APC figure on its journal pages.

Does Nature Physics allow preprints?

Yes — the journal's editorial policy states that it supports the posting of preprints (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-policies, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Where is the editorial team based?

Editors are based in Springer Nature offices in Berlin, London, Milan and Shanghai (source: nature.com/nphys/editorial-board, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

How is Nature Physics different from Nature Reviews Physics?

Nature Physics is the primary-research flagship physics journal of the portfolio. Nature Reviews Physics is a separate, non-primary journal publishing only Reviews, News & Views and Comment articles; it offers no gold open-access option and charges no publication fee (source: nature.com/natrevphys/publishing-model, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

How often is Nature Physics published?

Monthly — the September 2026 issue is Volume 22, Issue 9 (source: nature.com/nphys/, accessed 10 Oct 2026).

Sources and Compliance Note

Every factual claim in this profile is sourced from the journal's official pages on nature.com (journal homepage, About/Journal Information, editorial board, journal metrics, content types, editorial policies, and Nature Physics anniversary editorials) unless explicitly marked as a secondary summary. Figures such as the impact factor, download counts and editorial timelines were read from the journal's official journal-metrics page on 10 October 2026 and are labelled with their metric year (2025). The journal does not publish a current acceptance rate or a standalone standard APC figure, and this profile states that explicitly rather than substituting estimates. Aims and scope text is paraphrased, not copied; brief factual quotations are kept minimal. The complete source list is archived alongside this profile.