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Equation 5 · Part 1 · A Strained Crystal Is a Designer Spacetime

Symbol H

H=vF σ⋅(k−b)+vF W(x) k⋅1H = v_F\,\boldsymbol{\sigma}\cdot(\mathbf{k}-\mathbf{b}) + v_F\,W(x)\,\mathbf{k}\cdot\mathbb{1}
HH

What this part means

H is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

H is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

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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A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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