Saturday, March 18, 2017

Is there a duality between associative and co-associative space-time surfaces?

A more appropriate title of this posting would be "A new duality or an old duality seen from a number theoretic perspective?". The original proposal turned out to be partially wrong and I can only blame myself for breaking the rule "Wait for a week before posting!".

M8-H duality maps the preferred extremals in H to those M4× CP2 and vice versa. The tangent spaces of an associative space-time surface in M8 would be quaternionic (Minkowski) spaces.

In M8 one can consider also co-associative space-time surfaces having associative normal space. Could the co-associative normal spaces of associative space-time surfaces in the case of preferred extremals form an integrable distribution therefore defining a space-time surface in M8 mappable to H by M8-H duality? This might be possible but the associative tangent space and the normal space correspond to the same CP2 point so that associative space-time surface in M8 and its possibly existing co-associative companion would be mapped to the same surface of H.

This dead idea however inspires an idea about a duality mapping Minkowskian space-time regions to Euclidian ones. This duality would be analogous to inversion with respect to the surface of sphere, which is conformal symmetry. Maybe this inversion could be seen as the TGD counterpart of finite-D conformal inversion at the level of space-time surfaces. There is also an analogy with the method of images used in some 2-D electrostatic problems used to reflect the charge distribution outside conducting surface to its virtual image inside the surface. The 2-D conformal invariance would generalize to its 4-D quaterionic counterpart. Euclidian/Minkowskian regions would be kind of Leibniz monads, mirror images of each other.

  1. If strong form of holography (SH) holds true, it would be enough to have this duality at the informational level relating only 2-D surfaces carrying the holographic information. For instance, Minkowskian string world sheets would have duals at the level of space-time surfaces in the sense that their 2-D normal spaces in X4 form an integrable distribution defining tangent spaces of a 2-D surface. This 2-D surface would have induced metric with Euclidian signature.

    The duality could relate either a) Minkowskian and Euclidian string world sheets or b) Minkowskian/Euclidian string world sheets and partonic 2-surfaces common to Minkowskian and Euclidian space-time regions. a) and b) is apparently the most powerful option information theoretically but is actually implied by b) due to the reflexivity of the equivalence relation. Minkowskian string world sheets are dual with partonic 2-surfaces which in turn are dual with Euclidian string world sheets.

    1. Option a): The dual of Minkowskian string world sheet would be Euclidian string world sheet in an Euclidian region of space-time surface, most naturally in the Euclidian "wall neighbour" of the Minkowskian region. At parton orbits defining the light-like boundaries between the Minkowskian and Euclidian regions the signature of 4-metric is (0,-1,-1,-1) and the induced 3-metric has signature (0,-1,-1) allowing light-like curves. Minkowskian and Euclidian string world sheets would naturally share these light-like curves aas common parts of boundary.

    2. Option b): Minkowskian/Euclidian string world sheets would have partonic 2-surfaces as duals. The normal space of the partonic 2-surface at the intersection of string world sheet and partonic 2-surface would be the tangent space of string world sheets so that this duality could make sense locally. The different topologies for string world sheets and partonic 2-surfaces force to challenge this option as global option but it might hold in some finite region near the partonic 2-surface. The weak form of electric-magnetic duality could closely relate to this duality.
    In the case of elementary particles regarded as pairs of wormhole contacts connected by flux tubes and associated strings this would give a rather concrete space-time view about stringy structure of elementary particle. One would have a pair of relatively long (Compton length) Minkowskian string sheets at parallel space-time sheets completed to a parallelepiped by adding Euclidian string world sheets connecting the two space-time sheets at two extremely short (CP2 size scale) Euclidian wormhole contacts. These parallelepipeds would define lines of scattering diagrams analogous to the lines of Feynman diagrams.
This duality looks like new but as already noticed is actually just the old electric-magnetic duality seen from number-theoretic perspective.

For background see chapter Some questions related to the twistor lift of TGD of "Towards M-matrix" or the article with the same title.

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