Democratic Lagrangians for Nonlinear Electrodynamics

Abstract

We construct a Lagrangian for general nonlinear electrodynamics that features electric and magnetic potentials on equal footing. In the language of this Lagrangian, discrete and continuous electric-magnetic duality symmetries can be straightforwardly imposed, leading to a simple formulation for theories with the $SO(2)$ duality invariance. When specialized to the conformally invariant case, our construction provides a manifestly duality-symmetric formulation of the recently discovered ModMax theory. We briefly comment on a natural generalization of this approach to $p$-forms in $2p+2$ dimensions.

6 pages, slightly expanded, references added, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (5)

• Regular black holes with a nonlinear electrodynamics source
• On p-form gauge theories and their conformal limits
• The Action for Twisted Self-Duality
• Polynomial Duality-Symmetric Lagrangians for Free p-Forms
• Generalised Schwarzschild metric from double copy of point-like charge solution in Born-Infeld theory

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Massless chiral fields in six dimensions