Thermal spectral function asymptotics and black hole singularity in holography

Abstract

We investigate the analytic structure of thermal spectral function of holographic 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 non-perturbative 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.