Local electromagnetic duality and gauge invariance

Understand

Bunster and Henneaux and, separately, Deser have very recently considered the possibility of gauging the usual electromagnetic duality of Maxwell equations.

• By using off-shell manipulations in the context of the Principle of least action, they conclude that this is not possible, at least with the conventional compensating gauge fields scheme.
• Such a conclusion contradicts, however, an old result of Malik and Pradhan, who showed that it is indeed possible to introduce an extra abelian gauge field directly in the vacuum Maxwell equations in order to render them covariant under local duality transformations.
• Since it is well known that the equations of motion can, in general, admit more symmetries than the associate Lagrangian, this would not be a paradoxal result, in principle.