Subscripts and Superscripts (The Org Manual)

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### 12.3 Subscripts and Superscripts

‘`^`’ and ‘`_`’ are used to indicate super- and subscripts. To increase the readability of ASCII text, it is not necessary, but OK, to surround multi-character sub- and superscripts with curly braces. For example

    The radius of the sun is R_sun = 6.96 x 10^8 m.  On the other hand,
    the radius of Alpha Centauri is R_{Alpha Centauri} = 1.28 x R_{sun}.

If you write a text where the underscore is often used in a different context, Org’s convention to always interpret these as subscripts can get in your way. Configure the variable `org-use-sub-superscripts` to change this convention. For example, when setting this variable to `{}`, ‘`a_b`’ is not interpreted as a subscript, but ‘`a_{b}`’ is.

`C-c C-x \` (`org-toggle-pretty-entities`)

  This command formats sub- and superscripts in a WYSIWYM way.