Schwarz-Sen duality made fully local

Abstract

Duality symmetric electromagnetic action a la Schwarz-Sen is shown to appear naturally in a chain of equivalent actions which interchange equations of motion with Bianchi identities. Full symmetry of the electromagnetic stress tensor is exploited by generalizing this duality symmetric action to allow for a space-time dependent mixing angle between electric and magnetic fields. The rotated fields are shown to satisfy Maxwell-like equations which involve the mixing angle as a parameter, and a generalized gauge invariance of the new action is established.