Traces of Intertwiners for Quantum Groups and Difference Equations

In this Letter we study twisted traces of products of intertwining operators for quantum affine algebras. They are interesting special functions, depending on two weights ,, three scalar parameters q,,k, and spectral parameters z ₁,...,z _N , which may be regarded as q-analogs of conformal blocks of the Wess–Zumino–Witten model on an elliptic curve. It is expected that in the rank 1 case they essentially coincide with the elliptic hypergeometric functions defined by Felder and Varchenko. Our main result is that after a suitable renormalization the traces satisfy four systems of difference equations – the Macdonald–Ruijsenaars equation, the q-Knizhnik–Zamolodchikov–Bernard equation, and their dual versions. We also show that in the case when the twisting automorphism is trivial, the trace functions are symmetric under the permutation , k . Thus, our results generalize those of Etingof and Schiffmann, dealing with the case q=1, and Etingof, Varchenko, and Schiffmann, dealing with the finite-dimensional case.