Resurgence of Black Holes in Thermal OPE

Abstract

The momentum-space thermal OPE generically gives an asymptotic high-energy expansion of thermal two-point functions. We study the resurgent structure of this expansion in holographic CFTs at infinite and finite volume, whose dual bulk geometries are planar and spherical AdS black holes, respectively. The perturbative expansion is fixed to all orders by the stress-tensor sector of the thermal OPE and can be computed from a near-boundary analysis of the bulk wave equation. Non-perturbative effects, on the other hand, encode information about the bulk geometry away from the boundary. Using exact WKB analysis, we identify the locations of the associated Borel singularities as WKB actions between the AdS boundary and distinguished points in the complex radial plane, which include the black hole singularity in certain regimes. Furthermore, we identify a complex-frequency chamber in the timelike momentum regime where Borel resummation of the high-energy expansion reconstructs the full thermal two-point function. We further derive Stokes jumps that determine the non-perturbative contributions required upon crossing the boundary of this chamber.