Seminar: Thermal holographic correlators and the KMS condition

by Ilija Buric (Trinity College, Dublin)

Tuesday 27 May 2025, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Berlin

1083 (Notkestr. 9)

Thermal two-point functions in holographic CFTs receive contributions from two sets of operators, the stress tensor and its composites, and the double-trace operators. The sum of these two parts must satisfy the KMS condition i.e. be periodic in Euclidean time. The stress-tensor sector can be computed by analysing the bulk equations of motions near the AdS boundary and is not periodic by itself. We show that starting from the expression for the stress-tensor sector one can impose the KMS condition to fix the double-trace part, and hence the whole correlator. Our calculations are performed in the asymptotic approximation, where the stress-tensor sector can be computed exactly. One can either sum over the thermal images of the stress-tensor sector and subtract the singularities or solve for the KMS condition directly and perform the Borel resummation of the resulting double-trace data – the results are the same.

Based on 2505.10277 with Ivan Gusev and Andrei Parnachev.