Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Academic
Description
Target-space duality, or T-duality for short, is a duality that comes from physics in the presence of a torus symmetry but also has very concrete mathematical formulations and consequences. In its simplest form, when the target-space is a Riemannian circle, it is marked by inversion of the radius of the circle and swapping of physical quantities (winding and momentum) to yield equivalent physical theories. Mathematically, T-duality is made of two ingredients: • Topological T-duality relates the global topology of dual target-spaces: the background form on one side influences the topology of the dual space, there are isomorphisms be- tween the twisted cohomologies of T-dual spaces and also of their twisted K-theories. • Geometric T-duality is an isomorphism of Courant algebroids over T-dual spaces that allows one to transport geometric structures between T-dual spaces. In this talk we will review the basics of T-duality and delve into progresses in the cases when the torus action has fixed points and when one replaces the torus by non-Abelian objects, extending both topological and geometric T-duality.