Electric–magnetic dualities in non-abelian and non-commutative gauge theories

Abstract

Electric–magnetic dualities are equivalence between strong and weak coupling constants. A standard example is the exchange of electric and magnetic fields in an abelian gauge theory. We show three methods to perform electric–magnetic dualities in the case of the non-commutative U(1) gauge theory. The first method is to use covariant field strengths to be the electric and magnetic fields. We find an invariant form of an equation of motion after performing the electric–magnetic duality. The second method is to use the Seiberg–Witten map to rewrite the non-commutative U(1) gauge theory in terms of abelian field strength. The third method is to use the large Neveu Schwarz–Neveu Schwarz (NS–NS) background limit (non-commutativity parameter only has one degree of freedom) to consider the non-commutative U(1) gauge theory or D3-brane. In this limit, we introduce or dualize a new one-form gauge potential to get a D3-brane in a large Ramond–Ramond (R–R) background via field redefinition. We also use perturbation to study the equivalence between two D3-brane theories. Comparison of these methods in the non-commutative U(1) gauge theory gives different physical implications. The comparison reflects the differences between the non-abelian and non-commutative gauge theories in the electric–magnetic dualities. For a complete study, we also extend our studies to the simplest abelian and non-abelian p-form gauge theories, and a non-commutative theory with the non-abelian structure.