Free energy of the solvable chiral Potts model

Very recently, it has been shown that there are chiralN-state Potts models in statistical mechanics that satisfy the star-triangle relation. Here it is shown that the relation implies that the free energy (and its derivatives) satisfies certain functional relations. These can be used to obtain the free energy: in particular, we expand about the critical case and find that the exponent is 1–2/N.