Published for SISSA by Springer Received: January 26, 2015 Accepted: February 6, 2015 Published: February 25, 2015 Resurgence and the Nekrasov-Shatashvili limit: connecting weak and strong coupling in the Mathieu JHEP02(2015)160 and Lam´esystems G¨ok¸ceBa¸sara and Gerald V. Dunneb aMaryland Center for Fundamental Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, U.S.A. bDepartment of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract: The Nekrasov-Shatashvili limit for the low-energy behavior of N = 2 and N = 2∗ supersymmetric SU(2) gauge theories is encoded in the spectrum of the Mathieu and Lam´eequations, respectively. This correspondence is usually expressed via an all- orders Bohr-Sommerfeld relation, but this neglects non-perturbative effects, the nature of which is very different in the electric, magnetic and dyonic regions. In the gauge theory dyonic region the spectral expansions are divergent, and indeed are not Borel-summable, so they are more properly described by resurgent trans-series in which perturbative and non- perturbative effects are deeply entwined. In the gauge theory electric region the spectral expansions are convergent, but nevertheless there are non-perturbative effects due to poles in the expansion coefficients, and which we associate with worldline instantons. This provides a concrete analog of a phenomenon found recently by Drukker, Mari˜noand Putrov in the large N expansion of the ABJM matrix model, in which non-perturbative effects are related to complex space-time instantons. In this paper we study how these very different regimes arise from an exact WKB analysis, and join smoothly through the magnetic region.