Dear Dr. Narducci,

we just came across a highlight of a work by Liu et al. in Physical Review
Letters (http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.133601) -
and were, frankly, quite surprised in the light of the reaction to our recent
manuscript LU15371, which was rejected in the first round, and after our
attempt to address the concerns on suitability for publication in PRL
(because there was no scientific criticism) is still under review.

The two manuscripts were submitted with one day difference, (July 30 theirs,
July 31 ours), which I would consider almost at the same time. I was not aware
of the work of the Du group, otherwise I would have pointed this out, or we
would have tried to go for a joint or back-to-back publication.

As you may verify, the now published work of the Du group is by en large the
same experiment as half of our paper, except that they were not able to
observe the time-reversed single photon envelope as we did, but loaded an
amplitude-modulated single photon state in a cavity.

What we do not understand at this point how a manuscript that presents
basically a subset of our work is considered as newsworthy for PRL, while ours
was considered not interesting enough for a wider community to the extent that
it even gets highlighted.

We understand that the refereeing process always shows a spread of outcomes,
also because the two manuscripts may have been sent to different
reviewers. But we are very surprised to see that such collisions seem not to
be picked up in the editorial process, and resulted in two completely
contrary reactions (highlight vs. rejection of our work which we believe is a
superset of the work from the Du group). At the very least, we would consider
this as inconsistent.

We would be grateful if you could explain the rationale behind this decision,
and perhaps help us to structure our work better in the future such that it
could be perceived as more relevant to a larger audience. So far, we did
believe that Physical Review Letters remained a platform that does not require
to sell e.g. an optical cavity as a quantum interference device, but was more
serious in terms of the physics presented - and that there is an understanding
of the physics at the editorial level that picks up situations like the one at
hand. Do let us know if market pressure requires an adjustment of this
perception.


With Best Regards,

Christian Kurtsiefer