Resurgence and holomorphy: From weak to strong coupling

Abstract

We analyze the resurgence properties of finite-dimensional exponential integrals which are prototypes for partition functions in quantum field theories. In these simple examples, we demonstrate that perturbation theory, even at arbitrarily weak coupling, fails as the argument of the coupling constant is varied. It is well-known that perturbation theory also fails at stronger coupling. We show that these two failures are actually intimately related. The formalism of resurgent transseries, which takes into account global analytic continuation properties, fixes both problems and provides an arbitrarily accurate description of exact result for any value of coupling. This means that strong coupling results can be deduced by using merely weak coupling data. Finally, we give another perspective on resurgence theory by showing that the monodromy properties of the weak coupling results are in precise agreement with the monodromy properties of the strong-coupling expansions, obtained using analysis of the holomorphy structure of Picard-Fuchs equations.