Dual photons and gravitons

Abstract

We review the status of electric/magnetic duality for free gauge field theories in four space-time dimensions with emphasis on Maxwell theory and linearized Einstein gravity. Using the theory of vector and tensor spherical harmonics, we provide explicit construction of dual photons and gravitons by decomposing the fields into axial and polar configurations with opposite parity and interchanging the two sectors. When the theories are defined on AdS(4) space-time there are boundary manifestations of the duality, which for the case of gravity account for the energy-momentum/Cotton tensor duality (also known as dual graviton correspondence). For AdS(4) black-hole backgrounds there is no direct analogue of gravitational duality on the bulk, but there is still a boundary duality for quasi-normal modes satisfying a selected set of boundary conditions. Possible extensions of this framework and some open questions are also briefly discussed.