Singular Solutions to the Bethe Ansatz Equations and Rigged Configurations

We provide a conjecture for the following two quantities related to the spin-1/2 isotropic Heisenberg model defined over rings of even lengths: (i) the number of solutions to the Bethe ansatz equations which correspond to non-zero Bethe vectors; (ii) the number of physical singular solutions of the Bethe ansatz equations in the sense of Nepomechie and Wang 2013 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 46 325002. The conjecture is based on a natural relationship between the solutions to the Bethe ansatz equations and the rigged configurations.