Off-Shell Duality in Born-Infeld Theory

Abstract

The classical equations of motion of Maxwell and Born-Infeld theories are known to be invariant under a duality symmetry acting on the field strengths. We implement the SL(2,Z) duality in these theories as linear but non-local transformations on the potentials. We show that the action and the partition function in the Hamiltonian formalism are modular invariant in any gauge. For the Born-Infeld theory we find that the longitudinal part of the fields have to be complexified.