Duality, Marginal Perturbations and Gauging

Abstract

We study duality transformations for two-dimensional sigma models with abelian chiral isometries and prove that generic such transformations are equivalent to integrated marginal perturbations by bilinears in the chiral currents, thus confirming a recent conjecture by Hassan and Sen formulated in the context of Wess-Zumino-Witten models. Specific duality transformations instead give rise to coset models plus free bosons.