English

Analytic structure of holographic thermal correlators from Fourier series

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-03-31 v2

Abstract

We compute the holographic Euclidean two-point function of scalar operators in a thermal state. We work directly using the Fourier series on the thermal circle. The Fourier series does not converge as a function, but instead converges as a distribution, consistent with QFT expectations. The result is manifestly periodic and consistent with analyticity in the strip 0<Re(τ)<β0<\mathfrak{Re}(\tau)<\beta. Expanding in τ\tau we obtain all OPE coefficients, including the double-trace sector. Thus our approach has an advantage compared to recent work where double-traces were bootstrapped from stress-tensor data. Bouncing singularities appear as non-perturbative sectors in the transseries for Fourier coefficients, but their transseries parameters are all zero in the case of the Euclidean correlator.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13469,
  title  = {Analytic structure of holographic thermal correlators from Fourier series},
  author = {Paolo Arnaudo and Benjamin Withers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13469},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v2: minor revision. 30 pages, 4 figures, 1 Mathematica notebook