Bosonization and Duality in Condensed Matter Systems

We show that abelian bosonization of 1+1 dimensional fermion systems can be interpreted as duality transformation and, as a conseguence, it can be generalized to arbitrary dimensions in terms of gauge forms of rank $d-1$, where $d$ is the dimension of the space. This permit to treat condensed matter systems in $d>1$ as gauge theories. Furthermore we show that in the ``scaling" limit the bosonized action is quadratic in a wide class of condensed matter systems. (Talk given at ``Common trends in Condensed Matter and High Energy Physics", September 3--10, 1995 -- Chia).