Y-system and deformed thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (Q604967)

This paper is the first in a series of papers devoted to the exact theory of direct and inverse monodromy problems for the cubic anharmonic oscillator, and a new tool, the deformed Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA), is introduced. The monodromy problem of the cubic anharmonic oscillator is connected with the study of singularities of solutions of the first Painlevé equation. The method used in the paper generalizes Dorey-Tateo analysis of the monomial cubic oscillator. It is shown that the monodromy problem for the general cubic potential is encoded in the nonlinear nonlocal Riemann-Hilbert problem which is equivalent to the deformed TBA, which is a system of coupled nonlinear integral equations. A geometric interpretation is given.