Good news comes in threes or fours (or fives!)

In the fall, I wrote of my despair when hearing about three papers that had been rejected, all in the same week. Finally, all of these papers are in various stages of the publication process.

First, our paper on photo-mechanical optical devices (which we call PODs), just appeared in Optics Communications this month, which you can view by clicking here. I have talked about this work at several conferences, and I am getting very positive feedback. I am hoping to get this work funded in the near future. I believe that breakthroughs in this area could lead to amazing new technologies that will excite even the most jaded techies.

Secondly, the paper that got the nasty review, which I described in my post The Good, the Bad, and the Nasty, just got accepted. The letter from the editor is appended to this post.

A recent paper that we submitted to Advanced Materials, a high-impact journal, just appeared in print. This is a comment that my former student and colleague Javier Perez-Morena and I wrote on the work of some of our colleagues from Australia. We showed that their results were even more important than they originally thought - a happy outcome for all!

I learned about all three good news items this morning.

Finally, our paper on imaging studies of self-healing will appear shortly in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B. In addition, we have several papers that are in various stages of preparation and under review. New trials and tribulations surely await us!

***Update*** After all of this good news, I was pleased to learn of a fifth item of good news. In a previous post, I had talked about our newest Monte Carlo work, which we submitted to JOSA B. I just heard from Shoresh that this paper was accepted for publication with optional minor revisions. For once, the reviewers and I agree!

Letter from Journal of Chemical Physics

February 8, 2011

Title: The effect of electron interactions on the universal properties of systems with optimized off-resonant intrinsic hyperpolarizability

Author(s): David Watkins and Mark Kuzyk

Professor Mark G. Kuzyk
Washington State University
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Post Office Box 642814
Pullman, WA 99164-2814


Dear Professor Kuzyk,

The above manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Physics. You may receive requests from our office to ensure that all manuscript files are complete and suitable for typesetting. Once the manuscript files are in an acceptable format, they will be forwarded to the American Institute of Physics publication office.

This e-mail is the only notification you will receive of the acceptance of your paper. If you have questions about the production of your manuscript, you may find contact information for AIP production staff at...


No revisions of the manuscript can be made before the galley proof stage.

Sincerely yours,

Letter from Advanced Materials

Dear Dr. Perez-Moreno,

We are pleased to inform you that your Comment

"A Correspondence on "Organometallic Complexes for Nonlinear Optics. 45.
Dispersion of the Third-Order Nonlinear Optical Properties of Triphenylamine-Cored Alkynylruthenium Dendrimers". Increasing the Nonlinear
Optical Response by Two Orders of Magnitude." by Javier Perez-Moreno, Javier Perez-Moreno
Mark G. Kuzyk
has now been published online.


Your article is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201003421

The citation data and abstract (if applicable) are available free of charge from the same link; access to the full text may require a subscription.
Please use the above-mentioned URL to link to the article from your institutional homepage, e.g., on publication lists.

A reference to your article is also available from your personal homepage by selecting "Author" and then "My Published Articles".


Best wishes,

Advanced Materials
(Editorial Office)

A good week

Its nice to occasionally get good news. As you may recall from a previous post, I had three papers rejected in one weekend in late July. When the editors at Applied Physics Letters refused to send the paper out for review, we submitted it to Optics Communications. Both reviews came in positive. The reviewers' summaries follow.

Reviewer #1: This manuscript describes characterization of the response dynamics of cascaded photomechanical devices based on photosensitive liquid crystal elastomers.  The idea of these cascaded devices is the most interesting aspect of this work.  The authors have built and characterized the time response and fit to a three exponential functions. The authors have identified two possible mechanisms contributing.  The paper is well-written, conclusions well-founded and should be of strong interest in the community.  Publication is recommended.

Reviewer #2: This an excellent study of cascaded optomechanical devices that take advantage of the properties of liquid crystal elastomers.  It should essentially be published as is.

We have resubmitted a revised manuscript, which addresses only a couple of minor issues, so we expect the paper to be accepted soon.

In another post, I reproduced a letter that I sent to the Optical Society of America about allowing authors to submit papers in two-column format. I sent a similar email to Applied Physics Letters. Since I hadn't heard back from them, I assumed that they were blowing me off. I just received an email that the journal has actually implemented the change! They write:

Dear Dr. Kuzyk:

Since your e-mail, we have decided to allow 2-column manuscripts to be submitted. We will try it out and see if we receive e-mails from reviewers who do not like the 2-column formatting.

Thank you again for your help with our APL manuscripts.

Regards,
Apl