Duality completion of higher derivative corrections

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to determine higher derivative corrections in theories with duality symmetries, successfully completing the string theory effective action at order alpha' by leveraging duality constraints.

Contribution

The authors propose a new approach based on duality symmetry constraints to complete higher derivative corrections in theories, demonstrated on string theory's effective action.

Findings

Successfully completed the Riemann squared term to the full tree-level effective action.

Provided a systematic method to derive higher derivative corrections using duality symmetries.

Validated the approach by reproducing known results in string theory.

Abstract

We present a new method for completing higher derivative corrections for theories that exhibit duality symmetries under reduction. This proposal is based on the observation that duality symmetry in the reduced theory highly constrains the form of the unreduced theory. We apply this idea to closed bosonic string theory and complete the Riemann squared term to simply derive the known full tree-level effective action to order alpha'.