Action growth of dyonic black holes and electromagnetic duality

A bstract Electromagnetic duality of Maxwell theory is a symmetry of equations but not of the action. The usual application of the “complexity = action” conjecture would thus lose this duality. It was recently proposed in arXivid:1901.00014 that the duality can be restored by adding some appropriate boundary term, at the price of introducing the mixed boundary condition in the variation principle. We present universal such a term in both first-order and second-order formalism for a general theory of a minimally-coupled Maxwell field. The first-order formalism has the advantage that the variation principle involves only the Dirichlet boundary condition. Including this term, we compute the on-shell actions in the Wheeler-De Witt patch and find that the duality is preserved in these actions for a variety of theories, including Einstein-Maxwell, Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton, Einstein-Born-Infeld and Einstein-Horndeski-Maxwell theories.