Thermodynamical Bethe Ansatz
Giuseppe Mussardo
Abstract
Abstract The thermodynamics of a quantum field theory in an infinite volume can be determined by its S-matrix. This idea, originally proposed by R. Dashen, S.K. Ma, and H.J. Berstein, has been widely used to study the thermal properties of the integrable field theories in (1 + 1) dimensions. The reason consists of the particularly simple properties of these scattering matrices, as discussed in the previous two chapters, and the possibility to generalize to the relativistic case the thermodynamics Bethe ansatz (TBA) techniques successfully applied to non-relativistic problems by C.N. Yang and C.P. Yang. In the TBA approach, the derivation of the thermodynamics of a purely elastic scattering theory reduces to finding the solution of a set of nonlinear integral equations that rule the energies of the particle excitations and their statistical distribution.