Description of the Translation-Invariant Splitting Gibbs Measures for the Potts Model on a Cayley Tree

For the q-state Potts model on a Cayley tree of order k >= 2 it is well-known that at sufficiently low temperatures there are at least q + 1 translation-invariant Gibbs measures which are also tree-indexed Markov chains. Such measures are called translation-invariant splitting Gibbs measures (TISGMs). In this paper we find all TISGMs, and show in particular that at sufficiently low temperatures their number is 2(q) - 1. We prove that there are [q/2] (where [a] is the integer part of a) critical temperatures at which the number of TISGMs changes and give the exact number of TISGMs for each intermediate temperature. For the binary tree we give explicit formulae for the critical temperatures and the possible TISGMs. While we show that these measures are never convex combinations of each other, the question which of these measures are extremals in the set of all Gibbs measures will be treated in future work.