Duality and Global Symmetries

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of duality in field theories, emphasizing the role of global symmetries in establishing dualities across various systems including string theory and tensor fields.

Contribution

It systematically demonstrates how global symmetry considerations can be used to prove dualities in diverse field theories, covering both abelian and non-abelian cases.

Findings

Dualities are systematically derived using symmetry considerations.

Includes detailed discussion of T-duality and bosonization.

Addresses open questions in duality techniques.

Abstract

This is a general introduction to duality in field theories. The existence and breaking of global symmetries is used as a guideline to systematically prove duality between different field theories. Systems discussed include abelian and non-abelian T-duality in string theory, abelian and nonabelian bosonization, and duality for massless and massive antisymmetric tensor field theories in arbitrary number of dimensions. Open questions regarding these techniques are also discussed. (Lectures given at 33rd Karpacz Winter School `Duality: Strings and Fields' .)