‘^’ 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.
You can set org-use-sub-superscripts in a file using the export
option ‘^:’ (see Export Settings). For example, ‘#+OPTIONS: ^:{}’
sets org-use-sub-superscripts to {} and limits super- and
subscripts to the curly bracket notation.
You can also toggle the visual display of super- and subscripts:
org-toggle-pretty-entities) ¶This command formats sub- and superscripts in a WYSIWYM way.
Set both org-pretty-entities and
org-pretty-entities-include-sub-superscripts to t to start with
super- and subscripts visually interpreted as specified by the
option org-use-sub-superscripts.