Resurgence in sine-Gordon quantum mechanics: exact agreement between multi-instantons and uniform WKB

Abstract: We compute multi-instanton amplitudes in the sine-Gordon quantum mechanics (periodic cosine potential) by integrating out quasi-moduli parameters corresponding to separations of instantons and anti-instantons. We propose an extension of Bogomolnyi-Zinn-Justin prescription for multi-instanton configurations and an appropriate subtraction scheme. We obtain the multi-instanton contributions to the energy eigenvalue of the lowest band at the zeroth order of the coupling constant. For the configurations with only instantons (anti-instantons), we obtain unambiguous results. For those with both instantons and anti-instantons, we obtain results with imaginary parts, which depend on the path of analytic continuation. We show that the imaginary parts of the multi-instanton amplitudes precisely cancel the imaginary parts of the Borel resummation of the perturbation series, and verify that our results completely agree with those based on the uniform-WKB calculations, thus confirming the resurgence structure: divergent perturbation series combined with the nonperturbative multi-instanton contributions conspire to give unambiguous results. We also study the neutral bion contributions in the ℂP^N−1 model on ℝ¹×S¹ with a small circumference, taking account of the relative phase moduli between the fractional instanton and anti-instanton. We find that the sign of the interaction potential depends on the relative phase moduli, and that both the real and imaginary parts resulting from quasi-moduli integral of the neutral bion get quantitative corrections compared to the sine-Gordon quantum mechanics.