Description
The Yang–Baxter equation and the reflection equation, or boundary Yang–Baxter equation, are fundamental identities in quantum integrable systems, governing factorizable particle interactions on a line and on a half-line, respectively. While the Yang–Baxter equation is deeply connected to quantum groups, solutions of the reflection equation, called K-matrices, arise naturally from quantum symmetric pairs. In this two-part talk, we will survey recent joint work and open problems on quantum symmetric pairs, with special emphasis on affine type.