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#### 11.7.2 Subscripts and superscripts

Just like in LaTeX, ‘`^`’ and ‘`_`’ are used to indicate super- and subscripts. Again, these can be used without embedding them in math-mode delimiters. 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 mass of the sun is M_sun = 1.989 x 10^30 kg.  The radius of
         the sun is R_{sun} = 6.96 x 10^8 m.

To avoid interpretation as raised or lowered text, you can quote ‘`^`’ and ‘`_`’ with a backslash: ‘`\^`’ and ‘`\_`’. 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-export-with-sub-superscripts` to globally change this convention, or use, on a per-file basis:

         #+OPTIONS: ^:{}

With this setting, ‘`a_b`’ will not be interpreted as a subscript, but ‘`a_{b}`’ will.

`C-c C-x \`
  In addition to showing entities as UTF-8 characters, this command will also format sub- and superscripts in a WYSIWYM way.