CosmoCoffee

Following up the cosmo-ph thread (http://cosmocoffee.info/viewtopic.php?t=234 ): arXiv has announced the new classification scheme (a week ago, but I didn't notice until now): http://arxiv.org/new/physics.html . There are to be four "super-sections":

physics.AA Astrophysics
physics.HH High-Energy Physics
physics.SS Condensed Matter and AMO
physics.NN Nuclear Physics,

each divided into categories. For astrophysics, the categories are Cosmology, Galaxies, Stars and finally Earth and Planetary Physics, as well as the amalgamate Instrumentation and Data Analysis.

I personally think that these changes are excellent. (To my particular delight, the cosmology part in gr-qc has also been removed, leaving it to cover "general relativity and related theories, numerical and experimental results, black holes, gravity waves, quantum gravity, quantum field theory in curved space-time".)

Honestly I think this modification is completely useless... we will read just the supersection astrophysics.AA.

Cheers
Alessandro

Personally, I find it useful to be able to exclude stellar and planetary physics as well as instrumentation from the list of papers to browse. And I doubt whether people doing galaxy physics have a daily interest in brane cosmology, for example. For another, at the moment the placement of cosmology papers is pretty unclear: whether to put in hep-ph, hep-th, astro-ph or gr-qc seems pretty arbitrary.