Duality and higher Buscher rules in p-form gauge theory and linearized gravity

TL;DR

This paper explores duality transformation rules in multi-field theories including scalars, p-form gauge fields, and linearized gravity, revealing two main sets of duality rules and analyzing their behavior with topological terms.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for duality transformations in multi-field theories, extending Buscher rules to higher forms and including topological terms, with applications to linearized gravity.

Findings

Duality rules split into two sets: ordinary and higher Buscher rules.

Topological theta terms and B-fields are carefully incorporated into duality transformations.

Derived an action for linearized gravity with theta-term explaining gravitational duality relations.

Abstract

We perform an in-depth analysis of the transformation rules under duality for couplings of theories containing multiple scalars, $p$-form gauge fields, linearized gravitons or $(p,1)$ mixed symmetry tensors. Following a similar reasoning to the derivation of the Buscher rules for string background fields under T-duality, we show that the couplings for all classes of aforementioned multi-field theories transform according to one of two sets of duality rules. These sets comprise the ordinary Buscher rules and their higher counterpart; this is a generic feature of multi-field theories in spacetime dimensions where the field strength and its dual are of the same degree. Our analysis takes into account topological theta terms and generalized $B$-fields, whose behavior under duality is carefully tracked. For a 1-form or a graviton in 4D, this reduces to the inversion of the complexified coupling or generalized metric under electric/magnetic duality. Moreover, we write down an action for linearized gravity in the presence of $\theta$-term from which we obtain previously suggested on-shell duality and double duality relations. This also provides an explanation for the origin of theta in the gravitational duality relations as a specific additional sector of the linearized gravity action.