
Over time it became increasingly clear that, in many examples of interest, using the theory of Borel
summation for the perturbative sector it is possible to reconstruct some information about the nonpertur-
bative ones. This relation between the perturbative and nonperturbative sectors is known as resurgence,
and it was originally developed by ´
Ecalle in the context of ordinary differential equations [1] (see [2] for
a modern review) and later extensively used in quantum field theory: for recent reviews with a quantum
field theory scope, see [3–5], and in particular [6], which contains also a comprehensive list of references to
applications and other reviews.
Zero-dimensional quantum field theoretical models, which are purely combinatorial models,2are useful
toy models for the study of transseries expansions. Most conveniently, they allow one to set aside all
the complications arising from the evaluation and renormalization of Feynman diagrams. Moreover, their
partition functions and correlations typically satisfy ordinary differential equations, thus fitting naturally
in the framework of ´
Ecalle’s theory of resurgence. The zero dimensional φ4, or more generally φ2kwith
k≥2, models in zero dimensions have been exhaustively studied [6,10]. At the opposite end, the rigorous
study of the Borel summability in fully fledged quantum field theory is the object of constructive field
theory [11–13]. It should come as no surprise that the generalization of results on resurgence in zero
dimensions to fully fledged quantum field theory is very much an open topic. Not only one has to deal
with renormalization, but also in higher dimensions the ordinary differential equations obeyed by the
correlations become partial differential (Schwinger-Dyson) equations on tempered distributions, and one
can not simply invoke ´
Ecalle’s theory.
From this perspective, revisiting the resurgence in zero dimensional models using techniques inspired by
constructive field theory can be of great use. Here, following such route, we consider the zero-dimensional
O(N) model with quartic potential.3Denoting φ= (φa)a=1,...N ∈RNa vector in RNand φ2=PN
a=1 φaφa
the O(N) invariant, the partition function of the model is:4
Z(g, N) = Z+∞
−∞ N
Y
a=1
dφa
√2π!e−S[φ], S[φ] = 1
2φ2+g
4!(φ2)2.(1.2)
The N= 1 case has been extensively studied in [6]. One can analytically continue Z(g, 1), regarded
as a function of the coupling constant g, to a maximal domain in the complex plane. Subsequently,
one discovers that Z(g, 1) displays a branch cut at the real negative axis and that the nonperturbative
contributions to Z(g, 1) are captured by its discontinuity at the branch cut. A resurgent transseries is
obtained when one considers gas a point on a Rienamm surface with a branch point at g= 0. From now
on we parameterize this Riemann surface as g=|g|eıϕ and we choose as principal sheet ϕ∈(−π, π).
An approach to the study of the partition function in Eq. (1.2) in the case N= 1 is to use the steepest-
descent method [15, 16]. We concisely review this in Appendix A. One notes that on the principal sheet
only one Lefschetz thimble contributes. As gsweeps through the princial sheet the thimble is smoothly
deformed, but not in the neighborhood of the saddle point: the asymptotic evaluation of the integral is
unchanged. When greaches the negative real axis there is a discontinuous jump in the relevant thimbles
and a pair of thimbles (passing through a pair of conjugated non trivial saddle points of the action) starts
contributing, giving rise to a one-instanton sector in the transseries of Z(g, 1).
Another approach to the transseries expansion of Z(g, 1) is to use the theory of ordinary differential
equations [6, 10]. It turns out that Z(g, 1) obeys a second-order homogenous linear ordinary differential
2These are for example of interest in the context of random geometry, see for example [7–9].
3The same model has been considered in a similar context in [14], where the problem of constructing Lefschetz thimbles
in the N-dimensional space have been studied. By using the intermediate field formalism we will bypass such problem here.
4Note that we do not use the usual normalization g/4 of the interaction in the O(N) model, but stick to g/4! in order to
facilitate the comparison with the literature on transseries which deals mostly with the N= 1 case for which the normalization
g/4! is standard. Also, we do not use the ’t Hooft coupling λ=gN , which is needed for a well defined 1/N expansion: in this
paper we keep Nsmall.
3