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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.15114,
title = {Thermal spectral function asymptotics and black hole singularity in holography},
author = {Hewei Frederic Jia and Mukund Rangamani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.15114},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
9 pages, 1 figure. v2: Added refs and fixed typos