Related papers: Aspects of duality
The duality cascade, and its dual description as string theory on the warped deformed conifold, brings together several sophisticated topics, some of which are not widely known. These lectures, which contain a number of previously…
I review some recent results on four-manifold invariants which have been obtained in the context of topological quantum field theory. I focus on three different aspects: (a) the computation of correlation functions, which give explicit…
The duality map between gauge theories and strings suggests that when the gauge theory is in the weak coupling regime the dual string tension effectively tends to zero, $\alpha' \to \infty$. This observation of Sundborg and Witten initiates…
The first part of these lectures contains an introductory review of the AdS/CFT duality and of its tests. Applications to thermal gauge theory are also discussed briefly. The second part is devoted to a review of gauge-string dualities…
In this thesis we elaborate on the three subjects of the title. We first show that supertubes exist and still preserve some supersymmetry in a large variety of curved backgrounds. Within the AdS/CFT correspondence we study the supersymmetry…
String theories should reduce to ordinary four-dimensional field theories at low energies. Yet the formulation of the two are so different that such a connection, if it exists, is not immediately obvious. With the Schwinger proper-time…
We describe some of the novel 6d quantum field theories which have been discovered in studies of string duality. The role these theories (and their 4d descendants) may play in alleviating the vacuum degeneracy problem in string theory is…
It is now known (or in some cases just believed) that many quantum field theories exhibit dualities, equivalences with the same or a different theory in which things appear very different, but the overall physical implications are the same.…
We initiate a program to study the relationship between the target space, the spectrum and the scattering amplitudes in string theory. We consider scattering amplitudes following from string theory and quantum field theory on a curved…
Duality transformations with respect to rotational isometries relate supersymmetric with non-supersymmetric backgrounds in string theory. We find that non-local world-sheet effects have to be taken into account in order to restore…
This talk is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the duality relationships between superstring theories. These relationships are interpreted as providing evidence for the existence of a unique underlying fundamental…
We investigate whether the symmetry transformations of a bosonic string are connected by T-duality. We start with a standard closed string theory. We continue with a modified open string theory, modified to preserve the symmetry…
The nature of duality symmetries is explored in closed bosonic string theory, particularly in the case of a four-dimensional target space admitting a one-parameter isometry. It appears that the S-duality of string theory behaves analogously…
We investigate duality properties of N-form fields, provide a symmetric way of coupling them to electric/magnetic sources, and check that these charges obey the appropriate quantization requirements. First, we contrast the D=4k case, in…
Three subjects are considered here: a self-dual non-critical string that appears in Type IIB superstring theory at points in ${\rm K3}$ moduli space where the Type IIA theory has extended gauge symmetry; a conformal field theory singularity…
The time evolution operator (Schr\"odinger functional) of quantum field theory can be expressed in terms of first quantised particles moving on the orbifold $S^1/Z_2$. We give a graphical derivation of this that generalises to second…
Double field theory and exceptional field theory are formulations of supergravity that make certain dualities manifest symmetries of the action. To achieve this, the geometry is extended by including dual coordinates corresponding to…
The focus of the present thesis is on the analysis of gauge symmetry and its various impacts on gauge theories. In the first part of this thesis, we have studied different aspects of symmetries in connection with various field and string…
We use freely acting asymmetric orbifolds of type IIB string theory to construct a class of theories in four dimensions with eight supercharges. Their low energy effective field theories resemble $STU$ models, but have different duality…
We consider coupling an ordinary quantum field theory with an infinite number of degrees of freedom to a topological field theory. On R^d the new theory differs from the original one by the spectrum of operators. Sometimes the local…