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Abstract: It is natural to consider extending Maxwell's electrodynamics to include point-like sources of magnetic fields, i.e. magnetic monopoles. I will begin by discussing some classic results on monopoles and their interactions. I will then discuss electric-magnetic duality, the role of generalised symmetries, and efforts to develop theories of charges and monopoles interacting with light, all building up to a discussion of recent work on a novel, manifestly Lorentz-invariant, and straightforwardly quantisable action for duality-symmetric gauge theories. I will conclude with a brief review of the various attractive features of our proposal and the consistency checks it passes, as well as indicate directions for ongoing and future work.

About the Speaker: Madhusudhan Raman is a theoretical physicist with a broad set of interests in quantum field theory and string theory, and the mathematical structures that arise naturally when studying them. After completing his PhD in Chennai at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, he pursued postdoctoral fellowships in Mumbai (at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) and São Paulo (at the Instituto de Física Teórica) before joining the University of Delhi, where he has taught for the past three years. He is teaching two courses at Ashoka in Spring 2026: “Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Thinking” and “Mathematical Physics I: Mathematical & Computational Toolkit.”

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