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Published March 17, 2023 | Submitted
Report Open

S-duality in TT̅-deformed CFT

Abstract

TT̅ deformed conformal field theories can be reformulated as worldsheet theories of non-critical strings. We use this correspondence to compute and study the TT̅ deformed partition sum of a symmetric product CFT. We find that it takes the form of a partition sum of a second quantized string theory with a worldsheet given by the product of the seed CFT and a gaussian sigma model with the two-torus as target space. We show that deformed symmetric product theory admits a natural UV completion that exhibits a strong weak coupling ℤ₂ duality that interchanges the momentum and winding numbers and maps the TT̅-coupling λ to its inverse 1/λ. The ℤ₂ duality is part of a full O(2,2,ℤ)-duality group that includes a PSL(2,ℤ) acting on the complexified TT̅ coupling. The duality symmetry eliminates the appearance of complex energies at strong coupling for all seed CFTs with central charge c ≤ 6.

Additional Information

We thank Shazia-Ayn Babul, Cyuan-Han Chang, Liam Fitzpatrick, Alexander Maloney, and Erik Verlinde for very valuable discussions. The research of NB is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics Award Number DE-SC0011632. The research of SC is supported by the Sam B. Treiman fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. The research of HV is supported by NSF grant PHY-2209997. JK is supported by NSF grant PHY-2207584.

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023