Theory HEP Seminar

Resurgence, quantum geometry and complex instantons

Gokce Basar

University of Maryland

The theory of resurgence, a rigorous formalism for asymptotic analysis, provides novel connections between perturbative and non-perturbative physics in a variety of fields including quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and string theory. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of the subject. Then I will demonstrate that in certain quantum mechanical systems, the non-perturbative information is in fact fully encoded in the perturbative expansion. This surprising relation provides new insights on the structure of quantum mechanics and it has a remarkable interpretation through the exact WKB analysis. I will also show that complex instantons and configurations with non-positive actions play an important role in certain cases. Notably, the spectra of these quantum mechanical examples discussed in this talk are related to certain N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories.