Electric/magnetic duality for chiral gauge theories with anomaly cancellation

Jan De Rydt*, Torsten T. Schmidt, Mario Trigiante, Antoine Van Proeyen, Marco Zagermann

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We show that 4D gauge theories with Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation and possible generalized Chern-Simons terms admit a formulation that is manifestly covariant with respect to electric/magnetic duality transformations. This generalizes previous work on the symplectically covariant formulation of anomaly-free gauge theories as they typically occur in extended supergravity, and now also includes general theories with (pseudo)anomalous gauge interactions as they may occur in global or local N = 1 supersymmetry. This generalization is achieved by relaxing the linear constraint on the embedding tensor so as to allow for a symmetric 3-tensor related to electric and/or magnetic quantum anomalies in these theories. Apart from electric and magnetic gauge fields, the resulting Lagrangians also feature two-form fields and can accommodate various unusual duality frames as they often appear, e.g., in string compactifications with background fluxes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number105
JournalJournal of High Energy Physics
Volume2008
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 29 Dec 2008

Keywords

  • Anomalies in field and string theories
  • Supergravity models

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