On Affine Fusion and the Phase Model

Understand

A brief review is given of the integrable realization of affine fusion discovered recently by Korff and Stroppel.

• They showed that the affine fusion of the $su(n)$ Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten (WZNW) conformal field theories appears in a simple integrable system known as the phase model.
• The Yang-Baxter equation leads to the construction of commuting operators as Schur polynomials, with noncommuting hopping operators as arguments.
• The algebraic Bethe ansatz diagonalizes them, revealing a connection to the modular S matrix and fusion of the $su(n)$ WZNW model.