Dirac operators and geodesic metric on the harmonic Sierpiński gasket and other fractal sets (Q2264066)

For a compact spin Riemannian manifold, its geometry is encoded by a triple of objects, called a spectral triple. The spectral triple consists of the \(C^*\)-algebra of complex-continuous functions on manifold, the Hilbert space of \(L^2\)-spinor fields, and a differential operator called the Dirac operator. The observation that the Dirac operator defines the geometry is one of Alain Connes' contributions to the field of geometry. Connes' formula uses the information from the spectral triple in order to recover the geodesic distance on M, and hence the geometry of M. In the absence of spin, the results still hold, though the Dirac operator may not be uniquely defined. Viewing fractals as generalized manifolds and possibly noncommutative spaces and looking for suitable spectral triple to encode the geometry of a fractal is the motivation of the authors in the present paper. They have searched for possible spectral triples associated to the Sierpiński gasket. The Sierpiński gasket is a fractal set which is not a smooth manifold nor even a topological manifold. But the harmonic coordinate chart smoothes out the Sierpinski gasket. Kigami in a series of work in the following references [\textit{J. Kigami}, in: Asymptotic problems in probability theory: stochastic models and diffusions on fractals. Proceedings of the 26th Taniguchi international symposium, Sanda and Kyoto, Japan, August 31 -- September 5, 1990. Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific \& Technical; New York: Wiley. 201--218 (1993; Zbl 0793.31005), Math. Ann. 340, No. 4, 781--804 (2008; Zbl 1143.28004)], Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 932, 94 p. (2009; Zbl 1181.28011)] has found several formulas in the setting of the harmonic gasket which are measurable analogs to their counterparts in Riemannian geometry. The authors of the present article recover Kigami's measurable Riemannian geometry and provide a general construction of a Dirac operator and its associated spectral triple for a large class of sets built on curves by using methods from noncommutative geometry, this includes the self-similar Sierpiński gasket, the self-affine harmonic gasket, and other spaces which carry an intrinsic metric. Their results allow more flexibility and are better suited to a further development of geometric analysis on fractals.