Statistical mechanics of integrable quantum spin systems

This script is based on the notes the author prepared to give a set of six lectures at the Les Houches School ``Integrability in Atomic and Condensed Matter Physics'' in the summer of 2018. The responsibility for the selection of the material is partially with the organisers, Jean-Sebastien Caux, Nikolai Kitanine, Andreas Klümper and Robert Konik. The school had its focus on the application of integrability based methods to problems in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. My lectures were meant to complement this subject with background material on the equilibrium statistical mechanics of quantum spin chains from a vertex model perspective. I was asked to provide a minimal introduction to quantum spin systems including notions like the reduced density matrix and correlation functions of local observables. I was further asked to explain the graphical language of vertex models and to introduce the concepts of the Trotter decomposition and the quantum transfer matrix. This was basically the contents of the first four lectures presented at the school. In the remaining two lectures I started filling these notions with life by deriving an integral representation of the free energy per lattice site for the Heisenberg-Ising chain (alias XXZ model) using techniques based on non-linear integral equations.Up to small corrections the following sections 1-6 display the six lectures almost literally. The only major change is that the example of the XXZ chain has been moved from section 5 to 2. During the school it was not really necessary to introduce the model, since other speakers had explained it before. But for these notes I thought it might be useful to introduce the main example rather early. I also supplemented each lecture with a comment section which contains additional references and material of the type that was discussed informally with the participants.