Abelian duality on globally hyperbolic spacetimes

Autoren: Christian Becker, Marco Benini, Alexander Schenkel, Richard J. Szabo (2017)

We study generalized electric/magnetic duality in Abelian gauge theory by combining techniques from locally covariant quantum field theory and Cheeger-Simons differential cohomology on the category of globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds. Our approach generalizes previous treatments using the Hamiltonian formalism in a manifestly covariant way and without the assumption of compact Cauchy surfaces. We construct semi-classical configuration spaces and corresponding presymplectic Abelian groups of observables, which are quantized by the CCR-functor to the category of C*-algebras. We demonstrate explicitly how duality is implemented as a natural isomorphism between quantum field theories. We apply this formalism to develop a fully covariant quantum theory of self-dual fields.

Zeitschrift:
Comm. Math. Phys.
Verlag:
Springer
Seiten:
361-392
Band:
349, no. 1

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