English

T-duality and T-folds for point particles

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-12-09 v3

Abstract

We argue that the T-duality phenomenon is not exclusively a stringy effect but it is relevant also in the context of the standard point particle dynamics. To illustrate the point, we construct a four-parametric family of four-dimensional electro-gravitational backgrounds such that the dynamics of a charged point particle in those backgrounds is insensitive to a particular permutation of the parameters although this very permutation does alter the background geometry. In particular, we find that a direct product of the Euclidean plane with the two-dimensional Euclidean black hole admits a point-particle T-dual with asymptotically negative curvature. For neutral particles, this point-particle T-duality picture gets slightly modified because the T-duality map is no longer defined everywhere but only on a dense open domain of the space of states. We suggest a possible interpretation of this phenomenon in terms of a point particle T-fold.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.07571,
  title  = {T-duality and T-folds for point particles},
  author = {Ctirad Klimcik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.07571},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

11 pages, a discussion of consistency conditions for the definition of T-folds is added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:22:03.423Z