Equation 10 · Part 1 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Quantum and Condensed-Matter Systems
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What this part means
A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.
Its job in the formula
A raised mark can be a power or an index. Its position and the surrounding notation determine which.
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The passage around this formula
None of this history would be describable in ordinary language without one conceptual device: the quasiparticle. A solid contains on the order of 10^{23} interacting electrons per cubic centimeter, and no exact solution to that many-body problem exists or is expected. Lev Landau’s Fermi-liquid theory showed that in many metals, the low-energy excitations of this impossibly complex system behave, to good approximation, like a gas of weakly interacting particles carrying renormalized properties — an effective mass different from the bare electron mass, a finite lifetime, sometimes a fractional charge. A Cooper pair is a quasiparticle composite; the flat plateaus of the quantum Hall effect are…
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
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