Solving four-dimensional superconformal Yang-Mills theories with Tracy-Widom distribution

A bstract We study a special class of observables in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 2 and $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 4 superconformal Yang-Mills theories which, for an arbitrary ’t Hooft coupling constant λ , admit representation as determinants of certain semi-infinite matrices. Similar determinants have previously appeared in the study of level-spacing distributions in random matrices and are closely related to the celebrated Tracy-Widom distribution. We exploit this relationship to develop an efficient method for computing the observables in superconformal Yang-Mills theories at both weak and strong coupling. The weak coupling expansion has a finite radius of convergence. The strong coupling expansion involves the sum of the ‘perturbative’ part, given by series in 1 / $$ \sqrt{\lambda } $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msqrt> <mml:mi>λ</mml:mi> </mml:msqrt> </mml:math> , and the ‘non-perturbative’ part, given by an infinite sum of exponentially small terms, each accompanied by a series in 1 / $$ \sqrt{\lambda } $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msqrt> <mml:mi>λ</mml:mi> </mml:msqrt> </mml:math> with factorially growing coefficients. We explicitly compute the expansion coefficients of these series and show that they are uniquely determined by the large order behavior of the expansion coefficients of the perturbative part via resurgence relations.