Surface energy and elementary excitations of the XXZ spin chain with arbitrary boundary fields.

The thermodynamic properties of the XXZ spin chain with integrable open boundary conditions at the gaped region (i.e., the anisotropic parameter $\eta$ being a real number) are investigated.It is shown that the contribution of the inhomogeneous term in the $T-Q$ relation of the ground state and elementary excited state can be neglected when the size of the system $N$ tends to infinity. The surface energy and elementary excitations induced by the unparallel boundary magnetic fields are obtained.