Electric-magnetic duality and renormalization in curved spacetimes

Abstract

We point out that the duality symmetry of free electromagnetism does not hold in the quantum theory if an arbitrary classical gravitational background is present. The symmetry breaks in the process of renormalization, as also happens with conformal invariance. We show that a similar duality-anomaly appears for a massless scalar field in $1+1$ dimensions.

arXiv comment7 pages, 0 figures, Published version

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• Duality, Self-Duality, Sources and Charge Quantization in Abelian N-Form Theories
• Adiabatic regularization and particle creation for spin one-half fields
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