Related papers: U-duality as General Coordinate Transformations, a…
We shall review a novel formulation of four dimensional gauged supergravity which is manifestly covariant with respect to the non-perturbative electric-magnetic duality symmetry transformations of the ungauged theory, at the level of the…
We show that the partition function of free Maxwell theory on a generic Euclidean four-manifold transforms in a non-trivial way under electric-magnetic duality. The classical part of the partition sum can be mapped onto the genus-one…
Compactifications in duality covariant constructions such as generalised geometry and double field theory have proven to be suitable frameworks to reproduce gauged supergravities containing non-geometric fluxes. However, it is a priori…
This thesis deals with the two duality symmetries of N=2 D=10 supergravity theories that are descendant from the full superstring theory: fermionic T-duality and U-duality. The fermionic T-duality transformation is applied to the D-brane…
In this paper we describe the heterotic dual of the type IIB theory compactified to four dimensions on a toroidal orientifold in the presence of fluxes. The type IIB background is most easily described in terms of an M-theory…
The M-theory origin of the IIB gauged supergravities in nine dimensions, classified according to the inequivalent classes of monodromy, is shown to exactly corresponds to the global description of the supermembrane with central charges. The…
We consider hidden symmetries arising from U-duality in the dimensional reduction of non-maximal higher-derivative supergravities to three dimensions. In particular, we consider the $G_{2(2)}$ symmetry of minimal five-dimensional…
In this note we explicitly show how the generalization of the T-duality symmetry of the supermembrane theory compactified in M9xT2 can be reduced to a parabolic subgroup of SL(2,Z) that acts non-linearly on the moduli parameters and on the…
The T-duality symmetries of a family of two-dimensional massive integrable field theories defined in terms of asymmetric gauged Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten actions modified by a potential are investigated. These theories are examples of…
We develop methods to study the singularities of certain $G_2$ cones related to toric hyperkahler spaces and Einstein selfdual orbifolds. This allows us to determine the low energy gauge groups of chiral N=1 compactifications of M-theory on…
In the exceptional field theory, there are two natural parameterizations for the generalized metric; in terms of bosonic fields in the eleven-dimensional supergravity (M-theory parameterization) and the type IIB supergravity (type IIB…
We consider the target space theory of bosonic and heterotic string theory to first order in $\alpha'$ compactified to three dimensions, using a formulation that is manifestly T-duality invariant under ${\rm O}(d,d,\mathbb{R})$ with $d=23$…
Eleven-dimensional supergravity reveals large exceptional symmetries upon reduction, in accordance with the U-duality groups of M-theory, but their higher-dimensional geometric origin has remained a mystery. In this letter, we show that…
We reformulate the Hamiltonian form of bosonic eleven dimensional supergravity in terms of an object that unifies the three-form and the metric. For the case of four spatial dimensions, the duality group is manifest and the metric and…
This thesis analyses gauged supergravities in various dimensions and their possible origin from compactifications of string theory. In the effective description the fluxes appear in the theory as deformation parameters generating a…
We show how toroidally-compactified eleven-dimensional supergravity can be consistently truncated to yield a variety of maximally-supersymmetric ``massive'' supergravities in spacetime dimensions $D\le 8$. The mass terms arise as a…
We reconsider some older constructions of T-duality, based on automorphisms of the worldsheet operator algebra, in a modern context. It has been long known that at special points in the moduli space of torus compactifications, the target…
We discuss the topology of the symmetry groups appearing in compactified (super-)gravity, and discuss two applications. First, we demonstrate that for 3 dimensional sigma models on a symmetric space G/H with G non-compact and H the maximal…
We analyze D = 4 compactifications of Type IIB theory with generic, geometric and non-geometric, dual fluxes turned on. In particular, we study N = 1 toroidal orbifold compactifications that admit an embedding of the untwisted sector into…
This review talk focusses on some of the interesting developments in the area of superstring compactification that have occurred in the last couple of years. These include the discovery that ``mirror symmetric" pairs of Calabi--Yau spaces,…