Asymptotics in an Asymptotic CFT

TL;DR

This paper investigates the resurgent structure of the $$-deformation in a 2D integrable quantum field theory, using asymptotic techniques to analyze the free energy and uncover factorial growth patterns and non-perturbative effects.

Contribution

It applies modern matched asymptotic methods to the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz, revealing factorial asymptotics and non-perturbative cancellations in the $$-deformed theory.

Findings

Numerical evidence of factorial asymptotic behavior in free energy expansion.

Identification of the Cheshire Cat phenomenon with vanishing factorial growth.

Analytic demonstration of cancellation between perturbative and non-perturbative ambiguities.

Abstract

In this work we illustrate the resurgent structure of the $\lambda$-deformation; a two-dimensional integrable quantum field theory that has an RG flow with an $SU(N)_k$ Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal fixed point in the UV. To do so we use modern matched asymptotic techniques applied to the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz formulation to compute the free energy to 38 perturbative orders in an expansion of large applied chemical potential. We find numerical evidence for factorial asymptotic behaviour with both alternating and non-alternating character which we match to an analytic expression. A curiosity of the system is that it exhibits the Cheshire Cat phenomenon with the leading non-alternating factorial growth vanishing when $k$ divides $N$. The ambiguities associated to Borel resummation of this series are suggestive of non-perturbative contributions. This is verified with an analytic study of the TBA system demonstrating a cancellation between perturbative and non-perturbative ambiguities.