Prof. Paul Townsend FRS, DAMTP Cambridge

Title: Non-linear Electrodynamics and Chiral Bosons

Abstract:

In 1983, Bialynicki-Birula showed that there is an interacting and conformal strong-field limit of Born-Infeld theory with an Sl(2;R) duality invariance; he later showed that it describes a null fluid with an infinite number of conservation laws. More recently, this model has been shown to describe the internal IR dynamics of a D3-brane in the AdS5xS5 vacuum of IIB supergravity. A similar strong-field limit of the chiral 2-form  electrodynamics on the worldvolume of an M5-brane describes its internal IR dynamics in the AdS7xS4 M-theory vacuum. Following a review of this material, this talk will explain how  similar ideas, and a novel chiral dimensional reduction for strings,  lead to a manifestly Lorentz-invariant action for the Floreanini-Jackiw chiral boson theory, which can be viewed as a chiral null fluid in 1+1 dimensions.