U duality as general coordinate transformations, and space-time geometry Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We show that the full global symmetry groups of all the D-dimensional maximal supergravities can be described in terms of the closure of the internal general coordinate transformations of the toroidal compactifications of D=11 supergravity and of type IIB supergravity, with type IIA/IIB T duality providing an intertwining between the two pictures. At the quantum level, the part of the U duality group that corresponds to the surviving discretized internal general coordinate transformations in a given picture leaves the internal torus invariant, while the part that is not described by internal general coordinate transformations can have the effect of altering the size or shape of the internal torus. For example, M theory compactified on a large torus Tn can be related by duality to a compactification on a small torus, if and only if n3. We also discuss related issues in the toroidal compactification of the self-dual string to D=4. An appendix includes the complete results for the toroidal reduction of the bosonic sector of type IIB supergravity to arbitrary dimensions D3.

published proceedings

  • INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MODERN PHYSICS A

author list (cited authors)

  • Lavrinenko, I. V., Lu, H., Pope, C. N., & Tran, T. A.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Lavrinenko, IV||Lu, H||Pope, CN||Tran, TA

publication date

  • December 1999