The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

Abstract: We establish the large-$N$ asymptotic expansion of the (central) trace of the heat kernel on any compact classical group $G_N\subset\mathrm{GL}_N(\mathbb{C})$, which extends a previous result known only for $\mathrm{U}(N)$ \cite{LM2}. It admits two new interpretations of the trace: in terms of ramified coverings of the torus, and Gromov-Witten invariants on elliptic curves. These connections allow us to explore several aspects of the gauge/string duality in two dimensions: a Yang-Mills/Hurwitz duality, and Yang-Mills/Gromov-Witten duality.