ABSTRACT
In analogy with a previous treatment of strings, it is shown that membrane theories exhibit global noncompact symmetries which have their origin in duality transformations on the three-dimensional worldvolume which rotate field equations into Bianchi identities. However, in contrast to the string, the worldvolume metric also transforms under duality by a conformal factor. In this way the Cremmer–Julia hidden symmetries of supergravity are seen to be a consequence of supermembrane duality. Moreover, the string duality follows from that of the membrane by simultaneous dimensional reduction. Generalization to higher-dimensional objects is straightforward.
