It was noticed many years ago, in the framework of massless RG flows, that the irrelevant composite operator TT, built with the components of the energy-momentum tensor, enjoys very special properties in 2D quantum field theories, and can be regarded as a peculiar kind of integrable perturbation. Novel interesting features of this operator have recently emerged from the study of effective string theory models.In this paper we study further properties of this distinguished perturbation. We discuss how it affects the energy levels and one-point functions of a general 2D QFT in finite volume through a surprising relation with a simple hydrodynamic equation. In the case of the perturbation of CFTs, adapting a result by Lüscher and Weisz we give a compact expression for the partition function on a finite-length cylinder and make a connection with the exact g-function method. We argue that, at the classical level, the deformation naturally maps the action of N massless free bosons into the Nambu-Goto action in static gauge, in N + 2 target space dimensions, and we briefly discuss a possible interpretation of this result in the context of effective string models.

We study the analytic properties of the AdS 5 /CFT 4 Y functions. It is shown that the TBA equations, including the dressing factor, can be obtained from the Y-system with some additional information on the square-root discontinuities across semi-infinite segments in the complex plane. The Y-system extended by the discontinuity relations constitutes a fundamental set of local functional constraints that can be easily transformed into integral form through Cauchy's theorem.

We find a massive simplification in the non-perturbative expression for the structure constant of Wilson lines with 3 cusps when expressed in terms of the key Quantum Spectral Curve quantities, namely Q-functions. Our calculation is done for the configuration of 3 cusps lying in the same plane with arbitrary angles in the ladders limit. This provides strong evidence that the Quantum Spectral Curve is not only a highly efficient tool for finding the anomalous dimensions but also encodes correlation functions with all wrapping corrections taken into account to all orders in the 't Hooft coupling. We also show how to study the insertions of scalars coupled to the Wilson lines and extend our results for the spectrum and the structure constants to this case. We discuss an OPE expansion of two cusps in terms of these states. Our results give additional support to the Separation of Variables strategy in solving the planar N = 4 SYM theory.

Recently, it was shown that the spectrum of anomalous dimensions and other important observables in planar N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory are encoded into a simple nonlinear Riemann-Hilbert problem: the Pμ system or quantum spectral curve. In this Letter, we extend this formulation to the N=6 supersymmetric Chern-Simons theory introduced by Aharony, Bergman, Jafferis, and Maldacena. This may be an important step towards the exact determination of the interpolating function h(λ) characterizing the integrability of this model. We also discuss a surprising relation between the quantum spectral curves for the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and the N=6 supersymmetric Chern-Simons theory considered here.