Decoding the Path Integral: Resurgence and Non-Perturbative Physics

ABSTRACT
There are several important conceptual and computational questions concerning path integrals which have recently been approached from new perspectives motivated by "resurgent asymptotics", a novel mathematical formalism that effectively unifies 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, and then turn to several recent applications in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. 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.

BIO
Gerald Dunne is a Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut. He graduated from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and earned a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial College. He was then a postdoc in the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT and an Instructor in Applied Math at MIT. His research interests are primarily in non-perturbative methods in quantum field theory, with a particular interest in quantum systems under extreme conditions, such as the Schwinger effect and associated non-linear processes in ultra-high intensity QED physics.