Rodney Baxter - Australian National University
The order parameter of the chiral Potts model
An outstanding problem in statistical mechanics is theorder parameter of the chiral Potts model. An elegant conjecture forthis was made in 1983. It has since been successfully tested againstseries expansions, but as far as the author is aware there is as yet noproof of the conjecture. One can write down relations based on the"broken rapidity line'' method of Jimbo, Miwa and Nakayashiki for thisproblem, but until now it wasnot known how to solve them. In this talk I will show that if one makes acertainanalyticity assumption similar to that used to derive the free energy,then one can indeed solve a special case of the relations, therebyverifying the conjecture.