T duality for boundary-non-critical strings

TL;DR

This paper extends the understanding of T duality to open strings with boundary conditions that are neither purely Neumann nor Dirichlet, revealing new dualities and boundary interactions that break conformal symmetry.

Contribution

It generalizes T duality to boundary-non-critical strings by implementing it as a canonical transformation, uncovering non-conformal boundary interactions and their duals.

Findings

T duality can be applied to non-conformal boundary conditions.

Certain boundary interactions are T-dual to non-conformal boundary conditions.

The work draws parallels with boundary-non-critical quantum mechanics.

Abstract

Recent work on the action of T duality on Dirichlet-branes is generalized to the case in which the open string satisfies boundary conditions that are neither Neumann nor Dirichlet. This is achieved by implementing T duality as a canonical transformation of the $\sigma$-model path integral. A class of boundary interactions that violate conformal symmetry is found to be T-dual of a correspondingly non-conformal class of boundary conditions. The analogy with some problems in boundary-non-critical quantum mechanics of interest for condensed matter is pointed out.