The Yang-Baxter equation appear in various situations in physics and mathematics. For example it arises as a consistency condition in integrable models. The reflection equation (boundary Yang-Baxter equation) is a generalization of the Yang-Baxter equation to systems with a boundary. A further generalization to systems with defects which admits both reflection and transmission can be made, which results in reflection-transmission Yang-Baxter equations.In this thesis the Yang-Baxter equation and the reflection equation are presented. Representations of the Temperley-Lieb algebra and the blob algebra are used to construct matrices which solve the respective equations. For the reflection-transmission Yang-Baxter equations, steps toward a solution are taken by using a similar approach as for the first two cases, namely by finding an algebra whose representations can be used to construct matrices which solve the equations.
We construct the 1D
Z3 parafermionic model based on the solution of Yang-Baxter equation and express the model by three types of fermions. It is shown that the
Z3 parafermionic chain possesses both triple degenerate ground states and non-trivial topological winding number. Hence, the
Z3 parafermionic model is a direct generalization of 1D
Z2 Kitaev model. Both the
Z2 and
Z3 model can be obtained from Yang-Baxter equation. On the other hand, to show the algebra of parafermionic tripling intuitively, we define a new 3-body Hamiltonian
H^123 based on Yang-Baxter equation. Different from the Majorana doubling, the
H^123 holds triple degeneracy at each of energy levels. The triple degeneracy is protected by two symmetry operators of the system,
ω-parity
P(
ω=ei32π) and emergent parafermionic operator
Γ, which are the generalizations of parity
PM and emergent Majorana operator in Lee-Wilczek model, respectively. Both the
Z3 parafermionic model and
H^123 can be viewed as SU(3) models in color space. In comparison with the Majorana models for SU(2), it turns out that the SU(3) models are truly the generalization of Majorana models resultant from Yang-Baxter equation.