Equation 4 · Part 2 · A Strained Crystal Is a Designer Spacetime
Symbol x
What this part means
x is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
x is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol x→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The tilt is where the geometry stops being a figure of speech. Once the tilt varies smoothly from place to place across a crystal, an electron propagating through it is, at leading order in the standard low-energy expansion, equivalent to a particle moving through a curved effective spacetime of the same mathematical form — a Painlevé–Gullstrand metric — that describes an object falling into a black hole, with the tilt itself playing the role of the metric’s off-diagonal, “flow” components. The paper writes the whole statement as a single Hamiltonian, fixing the Fermi velocity , the Pauli matrices acting on the electron’s internal degree of freedom, the momentum-space…
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Sources cited in the article section
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