The order parameter of the chiral Potts model

Abstract

An outstanding problem in statistical mechanics is the order parameter of the chiral Potts model. An elegant conjecture for this was made in 1983. It has since been successfully tested against series expansions, but as far as the author is aware there is as yet no proof of the conjecture. Here we show that if one makes a certain analyticity assumption similar to that used to derive the free energy, then one can indeed verify the conjecture. The method is based on the ``broken rapidity line'' approach pioneered by Jimbo, Miwa and Nakayashiki.