Bouncing Off a Stringy Singularity

by Cristoforo Iossa

Tuesday 2 Dec 2025, 10:30 → 11:45 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

A sharp signature of black hole singularities in holography is a divergence of the boundary thermal two-point function at a specific point in complex time, arising from a null geodesic bouncing off the singularity. At finite ’t Hooft coupling, stringy corrections modify the bulk dynamics and the fate of this geodesic is an open question. We relate these divergences to the analytic structure of the two-point function in momentum space, and propose a simple scenario in which the divergences are smoothed into finite bumps. We illustrate this mechanism explicitly in the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model at infinite temperature.