Resurgence in topological string theory

Resumo

The study of physical theories in the nonperturbative regime is an interesting but difficult problem. In high energy theoretical physics the use of dualities inspired by the original AdS/CFT correspondence has become the main technique for calculating nonperturbative data. String theories, and in particular, topological string theory, lack nonperturbative definitions. The perturbative free energy, as series in the string coupling constant, is asymptotic, with zero radius of convergence. This is a general feature of many physical systems and it is the main concern of the mathematical theory of resurgence. One of the main results of this theory describes, in a quantitative way, the relation between the perturbative and nonperturbative information of a system. Encoded in the asymptotic growth of the series coefficients of perturbation theory is the information necessary to reconstruct nonperturbative sectors. All these sectors can be put together in a formal object called the transseries, whose different coefficients are related to each other by resurgence relations. The resurgent approach has been applied succesfully to problems in mathematics, on differential and difference equations, and in physics, on quantum mechanics and even quantum field theory. It is currently a very active area of research merging the efforts of both physicists and mathematicians. This thesis performs a resurgent analysis of the perturbative topological string theory. Using the holomorphic anomaly equations it is possible to compute coefficients of the perturbative free energy to very high order and analyze their asymptotic growth. In agreement with resurgence, it is found that nonperturbative sectors coming from a transseries control this growth. It is shown that this transseries can be computed as a solution of a natural extension of the holomorphic anomaly equations. The first half of this thesis is concerned with the main properties of the theory of resurgence and with the computation of the perturbative topological string free energy. These results are then applied to a concrete topological string example. A careful study of the asymptotic growth of the perturbative free energies is performed and various resurgence relations are uncovered. These relations involve elements of the transseries describing the full nonperturbative free energy. General properties of the transseries satisfying the holomorphic anomaly equations are described, including the role of the instanton actions, the presence of holomorphic ambiguities and the possibility of resonance. The numerical results are found to match, to high precision, the elements of the computed transseries. The asymptotic nature of the higher instanton sectors is also studied and a complicated net of resurgence relations is found.