Opers on the projective line, Wronskian relations, and the Bethe Ansatz

Abstract

It is well-known that the spectra of the Gaudin model may be described in terms of solutions of the Bethe Ansatz equations. A conceptual explanation for the appearance of the Bethe Ansatz equations is provided by appropriate G-opers: G-connections on the projective line with extra structure. In fact, solutions of the Bethe Ansatz equations are parameterized by an enhanced version of opers called Miura opers; here, the opers appearing have only regular singularities. Moreover, this geometric approach to the spectra of the Gaudin model provides a well-known example of the geometric Langlands correspondence. Feigin, Frenkel, Rybnikov, and Toledano Laredo have introduced an inhomogeneous version of the Gaudin model; this model incorporates an additional twist factor, which is an element of the Lie algebra of G. They exhibited the Bethe Ansatz equations for this model and gave an interpretation of the spectra in terms of opers with an irregular singularity. In this paper, we consider a new geometric approach to the study of the spectra of the inhomogeneous Gaudin model in terms of a further enhancement of opers called twisted Miura-Plücker opers. This approach involves a certain system of nonlinear differential equations called the qq-system, which were previously studied in [20] in the context of the Bethe Ansatz. We show that there is a close relationship between solutions of the inhomogeneous Bethe Ansatz equations and polynomial solutions of the qq-system and use this fact to construct a bijection between the set of solutions of the inhomogeneous Bethe Ansatz equations and the set of nondegenerate twisted Miura-Plücker opers. We further prove that as long as certain combinatorial conditions are satisfied, nondegenerate twisted Miura-Plücker opers are in fact Miura opers.