Gravity seminar - Gerald Dunne [ONLINE] Seminar

Abstract: There are several important conceptual and computational questions concerning path integrals for physical systems under extreme conditions, which have recently been approached from new perspectives motivated by "resurgent asymptotics", a novel mathematical formalism that seeks to unify perturbative and non-perturbative physics. This talk will review the basic ideas behind the connections between resurgent asymptotics and physics, starting from the work of Airy and Stokes, and the development of trans-series by Ecalle. I will describe several recent applications in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, where the main motivation is to develop a deeper understanding of field theoretic path integrals directly from a saddle point Lefschetz thimble decomposition, and also by reconstruction from perturbative information.