On non-abelian duality

A general study of non-abelian duality is presented. We first identify a possible obstruction to the conformal invariance of the dual theory for non-semisimple groups. We construct the exact non-abelian dual for any Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) model for any anomaly free subgroup, and the corresponding extension for coset conformal field theories. We characterize the exact non-abelian dual for \sigma-models with chiral isometries and extend the standard notion of duality to anomalous subgroups of WZW models thus giving a way of constructing dual transformations for different groups on the left and on the right. We also present some new examples of non-abelian duality for four-dimensional gravitational instantons.