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Equation 14 · Part 4 · Every Crystal Has Its Own Speed of Light

subtraction

1/∣i−j∣α1/|i-j|^{\alpha}
subtraction

What this part means

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

Its job in the formula

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

The passage around this formula

Trapped-ion chains make that material-dependence concrete, because they let experimenters dial the range of the interaction and watch the cone respond. Philip Jurcevic and collaborators encoded a tunable-range Ising model on chains of trapped calcium-40 ions, with couplings falling off as 1/|i-j|^{α\alpha} for an adjustable exponent α\alpha , and extracted the fastest magnon velocity the resulting dispersion supports. At short range the measured velocity agrees with the ordinary nearest-neighbour prediction; as α\alpha is pushed toward zero, toward an interaction that barely decays with distance at all, the velocity is consistent with growing without bound, and the light-cone picture stops…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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