The isospectral Dirac operator on the 4-dimensional orthogonal quantum sphere (Q934610)

The recent constructions of spectral triples have provided a number of examples showing that a marriage between noncommutative geometry and quantum groups theory is possible. A common feature of most of these examples is that the dimension spectrum is the same as in the commutative (\(q=1\)) limit. With the only known exception of the \(0^+\)-summable exponential spectral triple on the standard Podleś sphere given in [\textit{W. Van Suijlekom, L. Dąabrowski, G. Landi, A. Sitarz, J. C. Várilly}, \(K\)-Theory 35, No. 3--4, 375--394 (2005; Zbl 1098.58007)], in order to have a real spectral triple one is forced to weaken the usual requirements that the real structure should satisfy. It is only natural to try and construct additional explicit examples wondering in particular if these properties are common to all quantum spaces or are rather coincidences which happen for low dimensional examples. The authors present an example in dimension four given by a spectral triple on the orthogonal quantum sphere \(S_q^4\) which is isospectral to the canonical spectral triple on the classical sphere with the round metric. Equivariance under the action of \(U_q(so(5))\) is used to compute the left regular and spinorial representations of the algebra of \(S_q^4\). These representations are the constituents of a spectral triple on \(S_q^4\) with a Dirac operator which is isospectral to the canonical one on the round sphere \(S^4\) and which gives \(4^+\)-summability. Non-triviality of the geometry is proved by pairing the associated Fredholm module with an instanton projection. The authors introduce a real structure which satisfies all required properties modulo smoothing operators. There are a few reasons why in dimension greater than or equal to four the orthogonal quantum sphere \(S_q^4\) is most interesting to study: (1) All the relevant irreducible representations of the symmetry algebra \(U_q(so(5))\) are known [\textit{A. Chakrabarti}, J. Math. Phys. 35, No.~8, 4247--4267 (1994; Zbl 0809.17011)] and both the algebra \(\mathcal{A}(S_q^4)\) of polynomial functions as well as the modules of chiral spinors carry representations of \(U_q(so(5))\) which are multiplicity free. (2) The spectrum of the Dirac operator for the round metric on the undeformed sphere \(S^4\) is known [\textit{R. Camporesi} and \textit{A. Higuchi}, J. Geom. Phys. 20, No.~1, 1--18 (1996; Zbl 0865.53044)]. The sphere \(S_q^4\) could be relevant for noncommutative physical models. On \(S_q^4\), there is a canonical instantonic vector bundle [\textit{E. Hawkins} and \textit{G. Landi}, J. Geom. Phys. 49, No. 3--4, 272--293 (2004; Zbl 1065.19002)] and the study of the noncommutative geometry of \(S_q^4\) could be a first step for the construction of \(\text{SU}_q(2)\) instantons on this space.