Membrane duality revisited Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2015 The Authors. Just as string T-duality originates from transforming field equations into Bianchi identities on the string worldsheet, so it has been suggested that M-theory U-dualities originate from transforming field equations into Bianchi identities on the membrane worldvolume. However, this encounters a problem unless the target space has dimension D=p+1. We identify the problem to be the nonintegrability of the U-duality transformation assigned to the pull-back map. Just as a double geometry renders manifest the O(D, D) string T-duality, here we show in the case of the M2-brane in D=3 that a generalized geometry renders manifest the SL(3)SL(2) U-duality. In the case of M2-brane in D=4, with and without extra target space coordinates, we show that only the GL(4, R)R4 subgroup of the expected SL(5, R) U-duality symmetry is realized.

published proceedings

  • NUCLEAR PHYSICS B

altmetric score

  • 0.75

author list (cited authors)

  • Duff, M. J., Lu, J. X., Percacci, R., Pope, C. N., Samtleben, H., & Sezgin, E.

citation count

  • 15

complete list of authors

  • Duff, MJ||Lu, JX||Percacci, R||Pope, CN||Samtleben, H||Sezgin, E

publication date

  • December 2015