Publishing in SciPost: a must?

Now that I have published my first article in SciPost, let me comment on that experience.

 

Open peer review!

 

The main reason I was attracted to SciPost in the first place is that it practises open peer review, which means that the referee reports are publicly viewable. (The referees can choose to remain anonymous.) If one wants to improve the communication of research results, publishing referee reports is the obvious first step, as it requires no extra work, and has potentially large benefits on the quality of the process. Actually, publishing reports on a rejected article can even save some work if the article is later submitted elsewhere. (SciPost however erases reports on rejected articles.)

Physical Review Letters: physics' luxury journal

Have you ever wondered why this apparently interesting new paper on arXiv was only four or five pages long? Why it had this unreadable format with two columns in fine print, with formulas that sometimes straddle both columns, and with these cramped figures? Why the technical details were relegated to appendices or future work, if not omitted altogether? And why so much of the already meager text was devoted to boastful hot air?

Most physics researchers do not wonder for long, and immediately recognize a paper that is destined to be submitted to Physical Review Letters. That journal’s format is easy to recognize, as it has barely changed since 50 years ago – a time when page limits had the rationale of saving ink and paper. That rationale having now evaporated, the awful format has nevertheless survived as a signal of prestige. Because, you see, Physical Review Letters is supposed to be physics’ top journal, which means that publishing there is supposed to be good for one’s career.

Finite operator product expansions in two-dimensional CFT

While the conformal bootstrap method has recently enjoyed the wide popularity that it deserves, its applications have been mostly restricted to unitary conformal field theories. (By definition, in a unitary theory, there is a positive definite scalar product on the space of states, such that the dilatation operator is self-adjoint.) Unitarity brings the technical advantage that three-point structure constants are real, so squared structure constants are positive, leading to bounds on allowed conformal dimensions. However, dealing with non-unitary theories using similar methods is surely possible, at the expense of having the signs of squared structure constants as extra discrete variables. And unitarity is sometimes assumed even in cases where it brings no discernible technical benefit, such as in studies of torus partition functions, where multiplicities are positive integers whether the theory is unitary or not.

So it is refreshing that, in their recent article, Esterlis, Fitzpatrick and Ramirez apply the conformal bootstrap method to non-unitary theories.