Quantum corrections of Abelian Duality Transformations

Abstract

A modification of the Abelian Duality transformations is proposed guaranteeing that a (not necessarily conformally invariant) $\sigma$-model be quantum equivalent (at least up to two loops in perturbation theory) to its dual. This requires a somewhat non standard perturbative treatment of the {\sl dual} $\sigma$-model. Explicit formulae of the modified duality transformation are presented for a special class of block diagonal purely metric $\sigma$-models.