Integrable Chiral Quantum Field Theories with Spacetime-Dependent Interactions

Abstract

We construct a class of integrable chiral fermionic quantum field theories with interactions that depend on both space and time. The construction starts from a unitary, regular, difference-form two-body scattering matrix satisfying braiding unitarity and the Yang--Baxter equation. Each freely moving right- or left-moving particle carries a characteristic coordinate that remains constant along its trajectory, and the scattering matrix depends on differences of these coordinates. The many-body amplitudes form a discrete connection over the coordinate-ordering sectors. The Yang--Baxter equation gives local path independence, while periodic winding on a spatial circle produces quantum Knizhnik--Zamolodchikov (qKZ) difference equations expressing global flatness. Once a reference amplitude satisfying the exchange and qKZ constraints is specified, these transport equations determine the exact wavefunction in every fixed-particle-number sector. Independent reparametrizations of the right- and left-moving characteristics give couplings that depend on both space and time. For the chiral $SU(2)$ Gross--Neveu realization, we solve the qKZ equations for this full characteristic family using off-shell Bethe vectors. The resulting amplitudes are written in the characteristic labels, and their pullbacks give exact many-body wavefunctions for the corresponding space-time-dependent couplings. The two-body amplitude is a ratio of Gamma functions that resums the phase shifts from successive scattering processes. Equal-slope affine maps give a spatially homogeneous specialization in which the coupling depends only on time, and the Bethe ansatz with constant coupling is recovered when the qKZ step vanishes.