Spectral action for scalar perturbations of Dirac operators (Q409023)

Roughly speaking, the fundamentally important concept of (real) spectral triples \((\mathcal{A},\pi,\mathcal{H},D,J)\) in the theory of noncommutative geometry arises from a clever algebraic and analytical formulation of data given by the spin geometry on a compact manifold \(M\), for which \(\pi\) is the canonical multiplication representation of \(\mathcal{A} =C^{\infty}(M)\) on the Hilbert space \(\mathcal{H}\) of \(L^{2} \)-sections of the spinor bundle, \(J\) implements the involution of the Clifford algebra, and \(D\) is the Dirac operator associated with the torsion-free Levi-Civita connection. Since the concept of Dirac operator associated with a torsion-free connection is not available in the noncommutative case, it is of interest to consider spectral triples with \(D\) a general Dirac operator associated with non-torsion free connections (perturbed from the Levi-Civita connection), which then leads to the consideration of Dirac operators \(D\) suitably perturbed for the general case. In this paper, the authors compute the leading terms of the spectral action for perturbed Dirac operators. For the case of odd-dimensional compact spin manifold, the authors study the scalar perturbation \(D_{\Phi}:=D+\Phi\) (without \(J\)-reality) with \(\Phi\in C^{\infty}(M,\mathbb{R})\), including some explicit computation for the odd-dimensional spheres, plus the related noncommutative case of quantum \(\mathbb{S}^{3}\) (i.e. quantum \(SU(2) \)), and also investigate the torsion-perturbed Dirac operator \(D_{\Phi}:=D+\Phi+J\Phi J^{-1}\) for a regular real spectral triple with simple dimension spectrum \(\{1,2,3\}\).