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Concept
T-duality
Summary
In theoretical physics, T-duality (short for target-space duality) is an equivalence of two physical theories, which may be either quantum field theories or string theories. In the simplest example of this relationship, one of the theories describes strings propagating in a spacetime shaped like a circle of some radius , while the other theory describes strings propagating on a spacetime shaped like a circle of radius proportional to . The idea of T-duality was first noted by Bala Sathiapalan in an obscure paper in 1987. The two T-dual theories are equivalent in the sense that all observable quantities in one description are identified with quantities in the dual description. For example, momentum in one description takes discrete values and is equal to the number of times the string winds around the circle in the dual description.
The idea of T-duality can be extended to more complicated theories, including superstring theories. The existence of these dualities implies that seemingly different superstring theories are actually physically equivalent. This led to the realization, in the mid-1990s, that all of the five consistent superstring theories are just different limiting cases of a single eleven-dimensional theory called M-theory.
In general, T-duality relates two theories with different spacetime geometries. In this way, T-duality suggests a possible scenario in which the classical notions of geometry break down in a theory of Planck scale physics. The geometric relationships suggested by T-duality are also important in pure mathematics. Indeed, according to the SYZ conjecture of Andrew Strominger, Shing-Tung Yau, and Eric Zaslow, T-duality is closely related to another duality called mirror symmetry, which has important applications in a branch of mathematics called enumerative algebraic geometry.
T-duality is a particular example of a general notion of duality in physics. The term duality refers to a situation where two seemingly different physical systems turn out to be equivalent in a nontrivial way.
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