Anyonic interpretation of Virasoro characters and the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz

Employing factorized versions of characters as products of quantum dilogarithms corresponding to irreducible representations of the Virasoro algebra, we obtain character formulae which admit an anyonic quasi-particle interpretation in the context of minimal models in conformal field theories. We propose anyonic thermodynamic Bethe ansatz equations, together with their corresponding equation for the Virasoro central charge, on the base of an analysis of the classical limit for the characters and the requirement that the scattering matrices are asymptotically phaseless. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.