A quasi-Hopf algebra is a generalization of a Hopf algebra, which was defined by the Russian mathematician Vladimir Drinfeld in 1989. A quasi-Hopf algebra is a quasi-bialgebra for which there exist and a bijective antihomomorphism S (antipode) of \mathcal{A} such that for all and where and where the expansions for the quantities \Phiand \Phi^{-1} are given by and As for a quasi-bialgebra, the property of being quasi-Hopf is preserved under twisting.

Usage

Quasi-Hopf algebras form the basis of the study of Drinfeld twists and the representations in terms of F-matrices associated with finite-dimensional irreducible representations of quantum affine algebra. F-matrices can be used to factorize the corresponding R-matrix. This leads to applications in Statistical mechanics, as quantum affine algebras, and their representations give rise to solutions of the Yang–Baxter equation, a solvability condition for various statistical models, allowing characteristics of the model to be deduced from its corresponding quantum affine algebra. The study of F-matrices has been applied to models such as the Heisenberg XXZ model in the framework of the algebraic Bethe ansatz. It provides a framework for solving two-dimensional integrable models by using the quantum inverse scattering method.