T-duality Invariant Approaches to String Theory

Abstract

This thesis investigates the quantum properties of T-duality invariant formalisms of String Theory. We introduce and review duality invariant formalisms of String Theory including the Doubled Formalism. We calculate the background field equations for the Doubled Formalism of Abelian T-duality and show how they are consistent with those of a conventional String Theory description of a toroidal compactification. We generalise these considerations to the case of Poisson--Lie T-duality and show that the system of renormalisation group equations obtained from the duality invariant parent theory are equivalent to those of either of the T-dual pair of sigma-models. In duality invariant formalisms it is quite common to loose manifest Lorentz invariance at the level of the Lagrangian. The lack of manifest invariance means that at the quantum level one might anticipate Lorentz anomalies and we show that such anomalies cancel non-trivially. These represent important and non-trivial consistency checks of the duality invariant approach to String Theory.