Spontaneous magnetization of the superintegrable chiral Potts model: calculation of the determinant DPQ

Abstract

For the Ising model, the calculation of the spontaneous magnetization leads to the problem of evaluating a determinant. Yang did this by calculating the eigenvalues in the large-lattice limit. Montroll, Potts and Ward expressed it as a Toeplitz determinant and used Szegő's theorem: this is almost certainly the route originally travelled by Onsager. For the corresponding problem in the superintegrable chiral Potts model, neither approach appears to work: here we show that the determinant DPQ can be expressed as that of a product of two Cauchy-like matrices. One can then use the elementary exact formula for the Cauchy determinant. One of course regains the known result, originally conjectured in 1989.