Meeting the Snob Factor

The best journals employ a snob factor as a first cut to limit the deluge of submitted manuscripts that go out for peer review.  The editor uses the "desk reject" for potential papers that don't look interesting.  Then, the reviewers are asked to evaluate a manuscript's significance to the field prior commenting on the technical details.  These two layers of subjective assessment can doom a manuscript, relegating it to a polite rejection: the work might be technically correct, but it is not of broad enough interest.

One such journal is Optics Letters, published by the Optical Society of America.  Though it is eclipsed by the new OSA journal Optica in its impact, it is still a highly selective and respectable publication.  Recently, we beat the odds by receiving an acceptance letter (subject to minor revision) along with the initial reviews.  The preprint of the paper can be viewed at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.01216.pdf

While the paper is based on some esoteric principles, it provides the experimentalist with a recipe for adding one state to the simple model commonly used in the field to correct for the infinite number of states that are omitted for bovious practical reasons.  This magical state is a proxy for those infinite numbers of states that are ignored.  The figure shows a plot corresponding to the uncorrected model (left) and the corrected one (right).  The nice smooth green background and the sharp red along the diagonal is the signature of success.  We thought it cool and useful that such a proxy state could fix a problem that has been plaguing nonlinear-optical measurements for decades.  For once, the editor and reviewers agree.

Here is a summary of the reviews:

Reviewer 1:

The manuscript represents an important advance in the calculation of nonlinear susceptibilities because it presents for the first time a method for dealing with the difficult continuum states present in realistic models of molecules. Ignoring these states leads, as the authors identify, to large errors in the calculations while, perhaps surprisingly, a single proxy state allows one to eliminate these errors to a large degree. This proxy state is not just a mathematical fudge, it is defined through physically measurable quantities. I therefore strongly recommend publication. 

Reviewer 2:

This is an interesting work discussing corrections to polarizability and hyperpolarizability calculations for limited state models that can be made using a single proxy state.  The conclusions are well supported by the calculations and this will find significant interest in its community.