 Source: SPIRES |
Hot relationships
The growing relationship of astrophysics and particle physics is a hot topic these days. In addition to the appearance of new faces and institutions at the labs, the growth of this area of research can actually be seen in the references of particle physics papers.
High-energy physics research papers are usually posted to arXiv.org, and are categorized as Theory, Pheno-menology, or Experiment. There are also several other archives, including Astrophysics. Using spires citation data, one can check the fraction of papers in a given category that cite papers from one of the other archives. Because these numbers are limited to arXiv.org papers, there are several omissions. However, they can still give a rough idea of the influence that the various fields have on each other.
While all of the percentages have risen somewhat over the last 10 years, most notable is the rise in citations by theory and phenomenology papers of astrophysics papers (see chart). This increase (a tripling in phenomenology and even more in theory papers) is steeper than the rises seen in other fields and can be attributed, in part, to the growing relationships between astrophysics and particle physics.
Travis Brooks, SLAC
