The spectral action principle (Q1365445)

The authors propose and study a new action principle associated to a noncommutative space (spectral triple) \((\mathcal A,\mathcal H,D)\). First, the authors describe how to associate to a Riemannian manifold a spectral triple and outline how to define a spectral triple corresponding to the standard model and how the action functional of the standard model can be obtained in terms of noncommutative geometry, thus leading to a general action principle for spectral triples. Next, using heat kernel expansions, this action functional is studied in the case of matrix-valued smooth functions on a manifold and compared to the Einstein plus \(SU(N)\)-Yang-Mills action. The spectral action is taken as the bare action with bare quantities and a cutoff scale. The renormalization group equations and the relations between bare and physical quantities are discussed. Then the authors give a more detailed description of the spectral triple associated to the spectrum of the standard model and compute the spectral action functional (again viewed as the bare action) in this case. Again, the relation between bare and physical quantities and the renormalization group equations are discussed. It is shown that the resulting bounds on physical quantities are consistent with experimental data, provided the cutoff scale is about \(10^{15}\)GeV, with a disagreement of about 10 \(\sin^{2}\theta_{w}\). The Higgs mass is estimated to be in the region between 160 and 180 GeV. Finally, the authors discuss possibilities to modify the model to get closer to the experimental data.