Bouncing singularities and thermal correlators on line defects
- 1Princeton University
Abstract
A bstract Thermal correlators in holographic conformal field theories are known to exhibit singularities in complex time, sometimes referred to as “bouncing singularities”, which are believed to be related to bulk geodesics probing the black hole interior. These singularities correspond to exponentially suppressed contributions in the high-frequency limit of the thermal correlators. We revisit in detail the calculation of retarded two-point functions of local operators dual to bulk scalar fields in the planar AdS black hole background. We confirm that these correlators develop bouncing singularities, and highlight the agreement of two independent methods: a large frequency WKB analysis with infalling boundary conditions at the horizon; and an asymptotic OPE analysis that relies only on the near-boundary expansion, without any direct input from the black hole interior. We then extend these calculations to the case of the retarded two-point function of displacement operators on a Wilson line in the finite temperature gauge theory. This is computed holographically by solving the wave equation for the transverse fluctuations of the dual string worldsheet in the planar AdS black hole background. We find that these defect correlators also exhibit bouncing singularities, and again observe exact agreement between the WKB analysis sensitive to the black hole interior and the asymptotic OPE analysis. This agreement suggests that the bouncing singularities and the corresponding OPE data encode a universal high-frequency structure of the retarded correlators, and we propose a factorization formula that encodes the deviations from this universality.
Related
- Bouncing geodesics, black hole singularities, and singularities of thermal correlators
- Bouncing singularities in Schwarzschild: a geometric origin of the QNM convergence region
- Stringy resolution of bouncing singularities
- Fate of Bouncing Singularities at Finite GN
- Four-Point Yang-Mills Correlators in AdS4 from All-Line Recursion: All-Plus, Single-Minus and MHV
BibTeX
@article{giombi2026bouncing,
title = {{Bouncing singularities and thermal correlators on line defects}},
author = {Simone Giombi and Yue-Zhou Li and Jieru Shan},
journal = {Journal of High Energy Physics},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.1007/jhep07(2026)170},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep07(2026)170},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Bouncing singularities and thermal correlators on line defects
AU - Simone Giombi
AU - Yue-Zhou Li
AU - Jieru Shan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/17
JO - Journal of High Energy Physics
DO - 10.1007/jhep07(2026)170
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep07(2026)170
AB - A bstract Thermal correlators in holographic conformal field theories are known to exhibit singularities in complex time, sometimes referred to as “bouncing singularities”, which are believed to be related to bulk geodesics probing the black hole interior. These singularities correspond to exponentially suppressed contributions in the high-frequency limit of the thermal correlators. We revisit in detail the calculation of retarded two-point functions of local operators dual to bulk scalar fields in the planar AdS black hole background. We confirm that these correlators develop bouncing singularities, and highlight the agreement of two independent methods: a large frequency WKB analysis with infalling boundary conditions at the horizon; and an asymptotic OPE analysis that relies only on the near-boundary expansion, without any direct input from the black hole interior. We then extend these calculations to the case of the retarded two-point function of displacement operators on a Wilson line in the finite temperature gauge theory. This is computed holographically by solving the wave equation for the transverse fluctuations of the dual string worldsheet in the planar AdS black hole background. We find that these defect correlators also exhibit bouncing singularities, and again observe exact agreement between the WKB analysis sensitive to the black hole interior and the asymptotic OPE analysis. This agreement suggests that the bouncing singularities and the corresponding OPE data encode a universal high-frequency structure of the retarded correlators, and we propose a factorization formula that encodes the deviations from this universality.
SN - 1029-8479
SN - 1126-6708
SN - 1127-2236
ER -