So we've done some good experiments, analyzed data, and found some interesting results. What now? It's time to write everything up and submit it to a journal for publication. If only it was that easy...

Writing up work for publication is not exactly an easy task and not something to be done lightly. Once it's out there and published, it will be there as a permanent indication of your work. If everything is done well, interesting, and correct to within your error, then it's great news. If you mess up, that mistake is there forever with your name stuck on it. That's certainly exacerbated if you're the primary author on the paper. This is of course assuming that it actually gets published.

We're aiming rather high with this publication and, principally, writing a second longer paper in tandem. The first paper will be submitted to Physical Review Letters, with the second to a journal that accepts more lengthy publications. Physical Review Letters (PRL) is the top physics journal (aside from the much broader Nature or Science journals) and publishing in it is no easy feat. As an experimental paper, we've got to present either a new novel technique, unique system, or widely interesting result with a fair amount of reliable interpretation and analysis. Merely showing a "cool" result without qualification doesn't work. Nor does trying to publish something that is too small or incremental an increase to public knowledge. It has to be good enough to be interesting to physicists (and other scientists) that are not in the same field. True that if you've got a Nobel prize you can publish twadle, but most of the community has a pretty high bar to meet (and not too many Nobel physicists attempt to publish idle prattle either).

So we're in the middle ground right now. We've got a very interesting phenomena, in a new system. What we've seen is a nice effect, but has been seen in other materials. In and of itself, this wouldn't cut it. However, the material of interest, where it's been seen and studied before is extremely interesting (Platinum) and the results and conclusions of those studies are not yet final (ie, there is inconsistency between different models and experiments). So, what we're offering is in some ways a new system that is close enough to the old to be compared, but different enough that it might provide significant insight into the underlying mechanisms. ie, can this new system be used as a benchmark to settle which of the previous theories for platinum are correct?

We've got a new (though not novel) system with an interesting behavior (though previously observed). Still... that might not cut it. Thankfully we've got a good deal of data from our experiments that provides several different clues as to what is happening. Plus, we've done the experiment in two very different and complementary ways. So, if we put it all together, observations, comparisons, interpretations, and contrast it with one of the most interesting (and unsettled) metal surfaces, then we've got a strong case for PRL. Undoubtedly the referees will respond with comments and criticism which we will need to address. Potentially we will need some significant improvements in our work before it's deemed acceptable. But, I think we've got a strong case and are in good shape.