On M-theory and the symmetries of type II string effective actions Original Research Article

We study the “ordinary” Scherk-Schwarz dimensional reduction of the bosonic sector of the low energy effective action of a hypothetical M-theory on S1 × S1 ≊ T2. We thus obtain the low energy effective actions of type IIA string theory in both ten and nine space-time dimensions. We point out how to obtain the O(1,1) invariance of the NS-NS sector of the string effective action correctly in nine dimensions. We dimensionally reduce the type IIB string effective action on S1 and show that the resulting nine-dimensional theory can be mapped, purely from the bosonic consideration, exactly to the type IIA theory by an O(1,1) or Buscherʹs T-duality transformations. We then give a dynamical argument, in analogy with that for the type IIB theory in ten dimensions, to show how an S-duality in the type IIA theory can be understood from the underlying nine-dimensional theory by compactifying M-theory on a T-dual torus T̃2.