The Podleś spheres converge to the sphere (Q2142992)

In classical Riemannian geometry, there are two kind of metrics: one is the local Riemannian metric and the other is the Riemannian geodesic distance. This has an exact analogue in noncommutative geometry in terms of Connes-Rieffel distance and Rieffel's formulation of compact quantum metric space (CQMS). Given a noncommutative manifold of compact type with the associated spectral triple \((\mathfrak{A}, \mathscr{H}, D)\), where \(\mathscr H\) is a separable Hilbert space, \(\mathfrak A \subseteq \mathfrak B(\mathscr H)\) a unital \(\ast\)-subalgebra and \(D\) is a possibly unbounded self adjoint operator (called the Dirac operator) on \(\mathscr H\) such that \([D,a] \in \mathfrak B(\mathscr H)\) for all \(a \in \mathfrak A\), one defines a seminorm \(L_D\) on the \(C^*\) algebra generated by \(\mathfrak A\) by \( L_D(a)=\| [D,a] \|\) for \( a \in \mathfrak A\) and \(L_D(a)=\infty\) for \( a \notin \mathfrak A\). Under certain mild and natural conditions on the spectral triple, including the so-called `connectedness' condition, namely, \([D,a]=0\) if and only if \(a \in \mathbb C \cdot 1\), one obtains a CQMS \((\mathfrak A, L_D)\) in the sense of Rieffel. There is by now an extensive literature on CQMS (not necessarily coming from a spectral triple), including several generalizations of Gromov-Hausdorff convergence of CQMS. The present article adds an important example to this, by showing that the Podleś sphere \(S^2_q\) with the seminorm \(L_{D_q}\) coming from the spectral triples (with the corresponding Dirac operator \(D_q\)) constructed by Dabrowski and Sitarz [\textit{L.~Dąbrowski} and \textit{A.~Sitarz}, Banach Cent. Publ. 61, 49--58 (2003; Zbl 1061.58004)] is a CQMS for each \(q \in (0,1]\) and as \(q \to 1\), the above family of CQMS converges in the natural quantum Gromov-Hausdorff sense to the geodesic metric space corresponding to the classical \(2\)-sphere \(S^2\). This is a very satisfying result and in some sense analogous to the convergence of the so-called fuzzy spheres to \(S^2\) which was proved by Rieffel in one of the pioneering papers on the theory of CQMS [\textit{M.~A. Rieffel}, Gromov-Hausdorff distance for quantum metric spaces. Matrix algebras converge to the sphere for quantum Gromov-Hausdorff distance. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2004; Zbl 1043.46052)]. It is also very interesting to note that the authors construct a \(q\)-analogue of the fuzzy spheres too and prove that, for each \(q\), they do converge to the Podleś sphere~\(S^2_q\).