Duality-invariant nonlinear electrodynamics and stress tensor flows

Given a model for self-dual nonlinear electrodynamics in four spacetime dimensions, any deformation of this theory which is constructed from the duality-invariant energy-momentum tensor preserves duality invariance. In this work we present new proofs of this known result and also establish a previously unknown converse: any parametrized family of duality-invariant Lagrangians, all constructed from an Abelian field strength Fμν but not its derivatives, is related by a generalized stress tensor flow, in a sense which we make precise. We establish this and other properties of stress tensor deformations of theories of nonlinear electrodynamics using both a conventional Lagrangian representation and using two auxiliary field formulations. We analyze these flows in several examples of duality-invariant models including the Born-Infeld and ModMax theories, and we derive a new auxiliary field representation for the two-parameter family of ModMax-Born-Infeld theories. These results suggest that the space of duality-invariant theories may be characterized as a subspace of theories of electrodynamics with the property that all tangent vectors to this subspace are operators constructed from the stress tensor.