nLab
Poisson-Lie T-duality

Idea

What has come to be called nonabelian T-duality (Ossa-Quevedo 92) Poisson-Lie T-Duality (due to Klimcik-Ševera 95, von Unge 02) is a generalization of T-duality from fiber bundles equipped with an abelian group of isometries (torus bundles) to those with a nonabelian group of isometries.

Poisson-Lie T-duality may also be made manifest at the level of type II supergravity in the framework of double field theory on group manifolds. Using this framework both the NS/NS sector and the R/R sector are captured, and this allows to derive the transformation of the RR fields for full Poisson-Lie T-duality (Hassler 17).

As a partial duality of string theory

While ordinary abelian T-duality is supposedly a full duality in string theory, in particular in that it is an equivalence on the string perturbation series to all orders of the squared string length/Regge slope $\alpha'$ and the string coupling constant $g_s$, it has apparntly been shown by Martin Roček (citation?) that there are topological obstructions at higher genus for non-abelian T-duality, letting it break down in higher orders of $g_s$; and already a genus-0 (tree level) it apparently breaks down for the open string (i.e. on punctured disks) at some order of $\alpha'$.

Related $n$Lab entries

• topological T-duality

• spherical T-duality

References

The original articles are

• Xenia C. de la Ossa, Fernando Quevedo, Duality Symmetries from Non–Abelian Isometries in String Theories, Nucl.Phys. B403 (1993) 377-394 (hep-th/9210021)

• Ctirad Klimcik, Pavol Ševera, Dual non-Abelian duality and the Drinfeld double, Physics Letters B, Volume 351, Issue 4, 1 June 1995, Pages 455-462 (doi:10.1016/0370-2693(95)00451-P)

• Rikard von Unge, Poisson-Lie T-plurality, Journal of High Energy Physics, Volume 2002, JHEP07 (2002) (arXiv:hep-th/0205245)

Review includes

• I. Petr, From Buscher Duality to Poisson‐Lie T‐Plurality on Supermanifolds, AIP Conference Proceedings 1307, 119 (2010) (doi:10.1063/1.3527407)

• Konstadinos Sfetsos, Recent developments in non-Abelian T-duality in string theory, Fortschr. Phys., Special Issue: Proceedings of the “Schools and Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity” (CORFU 2010), 29 August – 12 September 2010, Corfu (Greece) Volume59, Issue11‐12 (arXiv:1105.0537)

See also

• Benjo Fraser, Dimitrios Manolopoulos, Konstantinos Sfetsos, Non-Abelian T-duality and Modular Invariance (arXiv:1805.03657)

Discussion of the duality at the level of type II supergravity equations of motion is (using Riemannian geometry of Courant algebroids) due to

• Branislav Jurco, Jan Vysoky, Poisson-Lie T-duality of String Effective Actions: A New Approach to the Dilaton Puzzle, Journal of Geometry and Physics Volume 130, August 2018, Pages 1-26 (arXiv:1708.04079)

Discussion within a broader picture of dual higher gauge theories, including 4d electric-magnetic duality:

• Ján Pulmann, Pavol Ševera, Fridrich Valach, A non-abelian duality for (higher) gauge theories (arXiv:1909.06151)

See also

• Pavol Ševera, Fridrich Valach, Courant algebroids, Poisson-Lie T-duality, and type II supergravities (arXiv:1810.07763)

• Falk Hassler, Poisson-Lie T-Duality in Double Field Theory (arXiv:1707.08624)

Discussion of nonabelian T-folds:

• Mark Bugden, Non-abelian T-folds (arXiv:1901.03782)