Fooling the Censor: Going beyond inner horizons with the OPE

Abstract

The analytic structure of holographic correlation functions at finite temperature contains information about curvature singularities of black holes in AdS. We compute the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) coefficients of the holographic two-point function of scalar operators at finite temperature and finite chemical potential. We show that the stress-tensor and current (T+J) sector of the OPE contains a singularity in the complex time plane at a location that can be identified with the time-shift of a bouncing geodesic in the charged black hole geometry: The geodesic starts at a boundary of a charged black hole in AdS, bounces off the timelike singularity, before returning to a different asymptotic boundary on the same side of the Penrose diagram. We show that the singularity in the T+J sector is smooth across the point where black hole becomes extremal, indicating that the analytic properties of holographic correlators could potentially probe naked singularities.