English

Abelian duality on globally hyperbolic spacetimes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-01-12 v3 Mathematical Physics Algebraic Topology Differential Geometry math.MP

Abstract

We study generalized electric/magnetic duality in Abelian gauge theory by combining techniques from locally covariant quantum field theory and Cheeger-Simons differential cohomology on the category of globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds. Our approach generalizes previous treatments using the Hamiltonian formalism in a manifestly covariant way and without the assumption of compact Cauchy surfaces. We construct semi-classical configuration spaces and corresponding presymplectic Abelian groups of observables, which are quantized by the CCR-functor to the category of CC^*-algebras. We demonstrate explicitly how duality is implemented as a natural isomorphism between quantum field theories. We apply this formalism to develop a fully covariant quantum theory of self-dual fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.00316,
  title  = {Abelian duality on globally hyperbolic spacetimes},
  author = {Christian Becker and Marco Benini and Alexander Schenkel and Richard J. Szabo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.00316},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

30 pages, no figures - Final version published in Communications in Mathematical Physics

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:34:15.168Z