The superintegrable chiral Potts quantum chain and generalized Chebyshev polynomials

Finite-dimensional representations of Onsager's algebra are characterized by the zeros of truncation polynomials. The Z_N-chiral Potts quantum chain hamiltonians (of which the Ising chain hamiltonian is the N=2 case) are the main known interesting representations of Onsager's algebra and the corresponding polynomials have been found by Baxter and Albertini, McCoy and Perk in 1987-89 considering the Yang-Baxter-integrable 2-dimensional chiral Potts model. We study the mathematical nature of these polynomials. We find that for N>2 and fixed charge Q these don't form classical orthogonal sets because their pure recursion relations have at least N+1-terms. However, several basic properties are very similar to those required for orthogonal polynomials. The N+1-term recursions are of the simplest type: like for the Chebyshev polynomials the coefficients are independent of the degree. We find a remarkable partial orthogonality, for N=3,5 with respect to Jacobi-, and for N=4,6 with respect to Chebyshev weight functions. The separation properties of the zeros known from orthogonal polynomials are violated only by the extreme zero at one end of the interval.