Moving from the mirror theory Bethe–Yang equations proposed by Arutyunov and Frolov, we derive the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz equations which should control the spectrum of the planar AdS5/CFT4 correspondence. The associated set of universal functional relations (Y-system) satisfied by the exponentials of the TBA pseudoenergies is deduced, confirming the structure inferred by Gromov, Kazakov and Vieira.

We derive a generalization of the Destri -De Vega equation governing the scaling functions of some excited states in the Sine-Gordon theory. In particular configurations with an even number of holes and no strings are analyzed and their UV limits found to match some of the conformal dimensions of the corresponding compactified massless free boson. Quantum group reduction allows to interpret some of our results as scaling functions of excited states of Restricted Sine-Gordon theory, i.e. minimal models perturbed by φ 13 in their massive regime. In particular we are able to reconstruct the scaling functions of the off-critical deformations of all the scalar primary states on the diagonal of the Kac-table.

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.

In presence of a static pair of sources, the spectrum of low-lying states of whatever confining gauge theory in D space-time dimensions is described, at large source separations, by an effective string theory. In the far infrared the latter flows, in the static gauge, to a two-dimensional massless free-field theory. It is known that the Lorentz invariance of the gauge theory fixes uniquely the first few subleading corrections of this free-field limit. We point out that the first allowed correction -a quartic polynomial in the field derivatives -is exactly the composite field TT , built with the chiral components, T andT , of the energy-momentum tensor. This irrelevant perturbation is quantum integrable and yields, through the thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA), the energy levels of the string which exactly coincide with the Nambu-Goto spectrum. We obtain this way the results recently found by Dubovsky, Flauger and Gorbenko. This procedure easily generalizes to any two-dimensional CFT. It is known that the leading deviation of the Nambu-Goto spectrum comes from the boundary terms of the string action. We solve the TBA equations on an infinite strip, identify the relevant boundary parameter and verify that it modifies the string spectrum as expected.