3 - The Bethe ansatz solution

Summary

The bare existence of this book is due to the amazing fact that the solution of the stationary Schrödinger equation for the one-dimensional Hubbard model can be reduced to a set of algebraic equations, which is tractable in the thermodynamic limit. These equations will be derived in this chapter. We will call them the Lieb-Wu equations to honour E. H. Lieb and F. Y. Wu, who first obtained them [298]. The derivation is based on a method, called the nested (coordinate) Bethe ansatz, which goes back to the seminal articles of C. N. Yang [493] and M. Gaudin [154], who generalized earlier work [60, 296] on exactly solvable models to models with internal degrees of freedom.

The roots of the Lieb-Wu equations parameterize the eigenvalues and the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the one-dimensional Hubbard model. They encode the complete information about the model. These roots are not explicitly known in the general N-particle case. In the thermodynamic limit (N →∞), however, only the distributions of the roots in the complex plane matter, and many physical quantities can be calculated as solutions of linear or non-linear Fredholm type integral equations. Moreover, it is sometimes possible to use the Lieb-Wu equations in an implicit way even for finite N, e.g., in the proof of the SO(4) highest weight properties of the eigenstates in Sections 3.D and 3.F of the appendix or in the calculation of their norm in Section 3.5.