PRL Cover Letter (prl-cover-letter)

When to trigger

• You are about to submit and need the cover letter
• The editors will triage primarily on importance + broad interest, and you must make that case
• A prior submission was declined on importance/breadth grounds and you are reframing
• You need to suggest/oppose referees within the cover letter (coordinate with prl-referee-strategy)

Purpose of the PRL cover letter

The cover letter's central job is to convince an APS editor — who may not be a specialist in your exact subfield — that the Letter clears the importance + broad-interest gate and merits review at PRL rather than at a specialized Physical Review journal. It is the breadth argument that the editor uses to decide whether to send the paper out for review at all.

It is not an abstract, not a summary, and not a place to oversell. It is a concise, specific, editor-facing case.

Structure (concise, ~3–5 short paragraphs)