Duality transformations for general abelian systems

Abstract

We describe the general structure of duality transformations for a very broad set of abelian statistical and field theoretic systems. This includes theories with many different types of fields and a large variety of kinds of interactions including, but not limited to nearest neighbor, next nearest neighbor, multi-spin interactions, etc. We find that the dual form of a theory does not depend directly on the dimensionality of the theory, but rather on the number of fields and number of different kinds of interactions. The dual forms we find have a generalized gauge symmetry and possess the usual property of having a temperature (or coupling constant) which is inverted from that of the original theory. Our results reduce to the well-known results in those particular cases that have heretofore been studied. Our procedure also suggests variations capable of generating other forms of the dual theory which may be useful in various specific cases.