Electric-magnetic duality and topological insulators.
We work out the action of the SL(2,Z) electric-magnetic duality group for an insulator with a nontrivial permittivity, permeability, and theta angle. This theory has recently been proposed to be the correct low-energy effective action for topological insulators. As applications, we give manifestly SL(2,Z) covariant expressions for the Faraday rotation at orthogonal incidence at the interface of two such materials, as well as for the induced magnetic and electric charges, slightly clarifying the meaning of expressions previously derived in the literature. We also use electric-magnetic duality to find a gravitational dual for a strongly coupled version of this theory using the gauge/gravity correspondence.
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Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1560, USA.