Duality Invariant Born-Infeld Theory

TL;DR

This paper constructs a duality-invariant Born-Infeld gauge theory with scalar fields, extending duality symmetry to a specific symplectic group and exploring supersymmetric extensions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Sp(2n,R) duality invariant Born-Infeld theory with complex gauge fields, reducing the duality group size compared to Maxwell theory, and discusses supersymmetric versions.

Findings

Developed a duality-invariant Born-Infeld theory with scalar fields.

Identified the duality group as Sp(2n,R) with reduced rank.

Presented a special case with SL(2,R) duality for n=1.

Abstract

We present an Sp(2n,R) duality invariant Born-Infeld U(1)^2n gauge theory with scalar fields. To implement this duality we had to introduce complex gauge fields and as a result the rank of the duality group is only half as large as that of the corresponding Maxwell gauge theory with the same number of gauge fields. The latter is self-dual under Sp(4n,R), the largest allowed duality group. A special case appears for n=1 when one can also write an SL(2,R) duality invariant Born-Infeld theory with a real gauge field. We also describe the supersymmetric version of the above construction.