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Equation 4 · Part 2 · A Strained Crystal Is a Designer Spacetime

Symbol x

W(x)W(x)
xx

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.

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 vFv_F , the Pauli matrices σ\boldsymbol{\sigma} 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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