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Thermal spectral function asymptotics and black hole singularity in holography

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

We investigate the analytic structure of thermal spectral function of holographic conformal field theories (CFTs), synthesizing recent developments into a set of observations about its asymptotics. Specifically, for a class of scalar primaries with integral dimension, we demonstrate factorization of the exact spectral function into a polynomial piece, which captures the vacuum dynamics, and a nonperturbative piece, which controls its asymptotics. Using exact WKB techniques, we derive a transseries expression for the latter. We use this information to deduce the singular loci of a spatially averaged thermofield double correlator in the complex time plane. Such singularities have been argued to encode information regarding the black hole singularity in the dual spacetime. Our results give a refinement of these statements by capturing the momentum dependence.

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